


light me up and lay me down

by ipretendtobesane



Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Roommates/Housemates, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/F, Fluff, Friends With Benefits, Homophobic Language, M/M, Recreational Drug Use, Slow Burn, Smut
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-26
Updated: 2020-05-11
Packaged: 2021-03-02 07:28:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 35,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23847451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ipretendtobesane/pseuds/ipretendtobesane
Summary: new york keeps getting more expensive, and they have to find a way to pay rent. all ian needs to do is stay the hell away from his new roommate. it should be easy, the guy's homophobic, constantly throwing around slurs, he's dirty, and seems to hate ian as much as ian hates him.it should be easy, until it isn't.(or the enemies to friends to lovers roommate au that nobody asked me to write)
Relationships: Ian Gallagher/Mickey Milkovich
Comments: 78
Kudos: 148





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> this is the longest piece i've ever written by a lot. i really hope you guys enjoy it, trigger warnings will be posted before every chapter, but nothing will be any worse than canon. happy reading!!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> idk how to do these summaries this ones just an intro really!! hope u enjoy it anyway tho

There are things about New York that remind him a lot of Chicago, that make him a little less homesick when his siblings’ birthdays roll around and he can’t afford to spend it with them. There are things- things such as the rudeness of the people walking down the street and clearly not giving a shit about you. Things such as people trying to gentrify their part of Brooklyn, the part that’s still shitty and poor. It felt familiar, for better or for worse, and he liked the familiarity of it all. 

Ian’s favorite thing about New York, above anything else, was being able to live in the city, in a shitty ass apartment with his brother, and look out over the rest of the buildings and the skyscrapers. He was never afforded that luxury in Chicago. 

His house in Chicago only looked out over other shitty south side houses and, if he tried hard enough, he could see the tiny little baseball field where he used to take boys when the night wasn’t too cold and it was too dark for anyone to see them together. 

There were few things worse than being a homo in the south side. 

That’s one thing he loves about New York. He goes to gay bars and clubs and he doesn’t do it discretely. He even worked in one for a while to pay for his classes at the community college near his apartment, and only got harassed, like, four times. 

Now he works at a small convenience store a few blocks away from his and Lip’s apartment. The rent keeps increasing at rates they can’t keep up with, which means he’s gonna have to start working longer shifts, or get another job. 

He didn’t mind it much. Back when they lived in Chicago him and all his siblings had to find ways to get money together so they could get by. When you’re being raised by your older sister and your parents enjoy stealing money from you, shit gets hard. He still has to work to get money together so him and Lip can make ends meet, but it’s easier somehow. It’s different, at least. He’s older, for one, and he doesn’t feel the need to… _do_ shit for other people just for the money. Ian’s lucky he never contracted any illnesses from the partners he was sleeping with at seven-fucking-teen.

Life is ass sometimes. That’s just something he’s gotten used to. 

Even now shit’s still, well, shitty. He’s not smart like Lip, not by a longshot. Lip, who’s an intern for a software engineering company. Lip, who’s so certain he’ll get a promotion soon and start getting paid good money. 

Money he’ll probably blow on cigarettes and beer. 

Fiona always said after they left- _You can leave the southside, but the southside will never leave you._

Everyday that statement becomes more glaringly obvious. 

So it ends up being Ian who provides most of the money for their household. Lip says he can do ‘whatever the fuck’ he wants to do with his money, since it’s because of him that they got out of Chicago in the first place.

Ian appreciates what his brother has done for him, of course he does. He’ll never say it, because that’s just not how he was raised. He’ll punch his brother in the nose if it means wiping the smirk off his face but he sure as hell isn’t about to thank him for shit, especially not when he doesn’t help out now that they got here. 

They need more money, that one doesn’t take a genius to discover, but they’re fresh out of options. 

At least, fresh out of options Ian _likes_.

When Ian got home from his shift, he came home to find Lip sitting at one of the mismatched chairs surrounding their small dining table. He was staring intently at something on his laptop, so Ian assumed he was just working on job applications. 

Lip’s internship was unpaid, so, to Ian, it made sense to think that he was looking for places to work since they’re poor as hell. Lip is waiting to get promoted at the engineering company, but he knows he needs to pull his weight with the rent before that happens. 

So Ian, naturally, assumed the obvious- his brother was trying to help them make ends meet by applying for a job.

Ian got one part right- he was trying to make ends meet, but he definitely wasn’t applying for a job. 

As Ian moved closer, he could see that Lip had Craigslist, of all sites, pulled up and he was scrolling through it; why, Ian didn’t know, but he knew nothing good could come from Craigslist. Especially not with his brother involved. 

“What are you doing?” 

“Eh… don’t worry about it,” he responded, cigarette dangling from his lips by the very end of the filter. He looked like an asshole, in his grey wife beater and jeans, but then again Lip usually looked like an asshole. It never made sense to Ian how he pulled so many girls. 

“Telling me not to worry about it just makes me wanna know more. Scoot over, dickbag, I’m sitting down.” 

Lip moved over begrudgingly, groaning as if scooting over so Ian could fit another chair beside him was a burden on his being. Ian scoffed and rolled his eyes. The exhaustion that comes from working all day coupled with the fact that Lip is most often an asshole was making his mood deteriorate. 

He loves his brother. He loves the memories he has of them growing up and stealing candy bars from the convenience store because the store owner was this middle eastern pushover that didn’t really give a shit. He remembers building the pool in the backyard so Fiona’s (Debbie’s) daycare kids could play (it ended up being used more by him and Lip at night, both of them with beers in their hands, talking aimlessly about things that didn’t matter. Like whether or not they’d ever make it out of Chicago. They did but… it was unexpected). 

He remembers, most vividly, the worry on his brother’s face when he was caught by the police for taking Liam and running away. The sadness in his eyes when Ian was shipped off to the psych ward.

Him and Lip get along really well, and he loves his brother, really he does, but when he sees that he’s looking for a roommate on fucking Craigslist of all places, he starts to love him a little less. 

“What the fuck, Lip, we don’t have any room for somebody else!” Ian exclaimed, dumbfounded. Their apartment was small, tucked away in a corner of Brooklyn untouched by money hungry renovators. There were two rooms, a kitchen that smelled faintly of mold and bacon grease, and a living room so small the couch folded in on itself to be able to fit snug against the wall. A big window looking out over the next building's roof, a faint stretch of the heart of the city far beyond the horizon that you could only really see at night when it lit up like a newly stricken match. 

Ian was skeptical of where the new person would sleep. It felt rude to make them sleep on their dusty old couch which barely fit two people, let alone a horizontal sleeping body. 

He voiced his concern to Lip who immediately looked apologetic, his eyebrows coming together and his hand coming up to scratch the side of his head. 

“I was, uh, actually thinking they could… stay in your room?” He phrased it as a question, but Ian knew right then and there that there was no point in arguing because there was no way he’d be able to convince Lip otherwise. It was a Gallagher trait- you gave as good as you got, and if you were getting more than you could handle you held out anyways. 

In simpler terms- Gallaghers were stubborn. 

“Fuck you, no goddamn _way_ am I sharing my room with some wack job you pulled from the street.” 

“Not the street-” 

“Yeah fucking _Craigslist_. Like that’s so much better.” 

Lip rolled his eyes and turned the computer towards Ian, pushing it so it almost tipped off the table but Ian catches it before it does, glaring at Lip for almost ruining the only working piece of technology they had. 

Lip just shrugged as he pulled his backpack over his shoulder, shoving his feet into his converse as he started walking towards the door. 

He stood at the door for a second, turning around to face Ian before leaving for whatever the fuck it was he was planning on doing. His face was in the same constipated apologetic expression that it was in before.

“Also, I told them to email _you_ . So have fun picking out your roommate!” He walked out as Ian was calling him a _fucking asshole_. He caught a glimpse of a smirk as Lip walked away. 

Ian sighed, closing the top of the laptop, not wanting to bother with that shit. 

He made his way to his bedroom, slipping off his shoes and leaving them by the door. His room was the last door in the hallway. It was a decent size, smaller than Lip’s but not by too much, and he typically kept it rather clean, so there was at least room to walk from one wall to the other. His window was facing the building behind theirs, so his view was a wonderful brick wall. 

He didn’t mind it much, it beat looking over the broken down crack house looking homes of his old neighborhood. 

And besides, sometimes the couple whose window faced his would fuck with the curtains pulled wide open, so at least he got entertainment. 

He flopped onto his bed , letting the mattress bounce him up and down as he laid there. 

He spent some time thinking about Lip’s idea. They could certainly use the money, but Ian didn’t know how it would work logistically. He could squeeze in a mattress on the floor, the sliver of space beside his bed could probably fit a person, but that feels barbarian, making them sleep on the floor. 

It should be their space too, which is why it’s even more confusing to Ian that Lip won’t split his room. He could find some cute bottle blonde to share his bed and help pay the rent. 

He knows Lip’s dating Tami, but he also knows neither of them are very good at being loyal to one another. She comes overs a few times a week, they fuck, and she leaves. It doesn’t much sound like a relationship to Ian, but then again what does he know. His last relationship ended up in flames, and he swore off feelings for good. They’re too messy, too much trouble, and someone always ends up getting hurt. 

Ian refuses to get hurt again. 

He’s lying on his bed thinking about Lip and Tami and him and Caleb. Caleb- who was older than him, twenty-one where Ian was sixteen. Caleb- who taught him love was sweet and moved quickly. Caleb- who always smelled faintly of cigarettes and sweat, but in a way that was pleasant and welcoming. 

Caleb- who cheated on him with a fucking _girl_ , the same day he told Ian he loved him. 

Ian wouldn’t call himself a hopeless romantic, not by any means, but he used to believe something good could happen to him. He was naive, sure, but it was easier to get through the days when you believed there was a chance your life wouldn’t be shitty forever. 

Ian’s at least glad he never told Caleb he loved him back. He didn’t know what love meant back then, didn’t know how to get his lips to form the words. The only person he’s ever said _I love you_ to was Fiona when he was little and she was tucking him into bed. 

He’s pretty sure he never even said it to his mom, even when she begged him to. 

He misses her, for better or for worse. She’s the only one who ever really understood him. When he was running away and stealing army property she didn’t judge him. He resonated with her, her manic laughter and her bouts of crying. It was something he knew intimately, and though she and Frank may have abandoned him, and she was a very shitty mother, she was still his. 

He laughs a little, a sad chuckle, at the thought of his family and their situation. An older sister forced to raise her siblings just because her deadbeat parents were too busy getting drunk to ever bother. 

He has fond memories of his childhood, nonetheless. Fond memories of chasing Carl down the street when the asphalt was too hot to stand on, they danced their way down the road, steps quick with laughter, biting their tongues. He remembers feeling so proud when Liam learned to walk and when Debbie said his name for the first time. 

The only memories he has with his mother involve finding out he’s not his father’s son, and when she took him across the country just for him to find out she was selling hard drugs. 

And with his father? The only memory he has of that bag of dicks was when he beat him with a baseball bat so he’d get out of their house.

They have a nice relationship, Ian and his parents.

His mind starts jumping around to other topics. Circling around everything but the roommate he doesn’t want to think about. 

It’s very like Lip to do something without any care for another person. He’s not an asshole, but he can be selfish. Like every time he (purposefully) neglects to tell Ian he’s bringing Tami over, so he’s forced to either sit in his room and listen to the sounds of his brothers bed banging against their shared wall or go out and fuck around for however long it takes until Lip is done. 

When they first moved here, he was more than happy to explore New York. He’d take the train up to the East Village and pop his head into the clubs and bars that populated that part of the city. 

Everything was all bright lights and cigarette smoke. It was vibrant and exciting. It was new and it turned his cheeks pink with amazement. 

There’s something about New York, something peculiar and particular that exists only in the city. The yellow cabs honking and the people pushing past you so they can walk faster. The museums he sometimes sneaks in to, just so he can spend hours in front of canvas after canvas, sculpture after sculpture. 

But as much as he loves the city, the novelty of it has started to wear off. Now when people push past him on the sidewalk it’s just annoying, not some riveting part of city life. 

It’s funny. Chicago was the same way, the same rudeness, same desperate anxious energy, but for some reason (probably because of the fact that it was the greatest city in the world) New York feels different. 

After a good hour of laying on his bed and staring aimlessly at the ceiling, Ian decided to get up and work on what was haunting him- 

The roommate applications. 

He groaned as he moved, even though no one was there to hear his resentment. 

Maybe there would be perks to the whole roommate thing; at least someone would be there to respond to his woes. 

Ian made his way over to the kitchen, hand dancing along the wall and he moved down his hallway. The kitchen matched the rest of the apartment- cramped and stained in places stains shouldn’t be able to reach. It could barely fit their little table shoved unceremoniously into the corner. 

The laptop was still on it, closed from where Ian had slammed it shut before. He sighed as he sat down, pulling open the top and typing in his password. 

He pulled up his email and the ad on Craigslist, curious as to what Lip had put down. 

It wasn’t anything to write home about, just a simple _Roommate Needed_ and a poor description of their apartment. He had the nerve to add the fact that whoever ended up living with them would probably end up sleeping on the floor of Ian’s bedroom ( _the nerve_ because the motherfucker never bothered to ask Ian how he felt about it). 

He went back to his email tab, looking through the most recent ones that had to do with the roommate application. There were about four so far, apparently people are really desperate for apartments in New York because jesus fuck his place was not that nice. 

He deleted the one that said _roommate app. ! :)_ just because he doesn’t think he could match the energy of someone who put smiley faces in their email subjects. 

He opened one from a girl whose email was _lolababy13_ which was enticing, to say the least. But the email itself looked safe. She described herself as calm and studious and said she just needed a place to sleep. 

A place to sleep is all they could really afford to provide, so Ian was hopeful that maybe they’d end up choosing her. She didn’t sound like a hassle, and all she’d do is sleep on his floor, anyways.

He continued reading the email, discovering more about lolababy, the girl who could potentially be the person sleeping beside the demon under his bed. 

It was all fine and lovely. She was educated, had a stable job working as a receptionist for a vet, and was fine only using the apartment as a place to crash every night. 

It was fine until he got to the picture she included of herself, a picture of her and some guy in front of a truck with the confederate flag attached to it. 

He closed out of the email before even finding out if it was her brother or her boyfriend. 

He can only assume she would piss herself if she had to split a room with a homo. 

The next email he opens is from a generic gamer guy username with too many numbers for him to really bother reading the email address, but the subject is just _roommate application_ which is appealing.

Ian immediately regrets ever opening the email, because once he does a penis pops up on his screen, gamer guy 3000’s hand wrapped around it. 

Ian holds in the urge to gag. It was unsolicited, but beyond that- it wasn’t even a good dick pick. If you’re going to send them to everyone who’s useless enough to place their email on a public site you might as well make it look good. 

Ian sighs, defeated, and closes the tab before even opening the last email, too tired to deal with the possibility of yet another penis in his inbox. 

He’ll just tell Lip to look at it when he gets home from wherever he fucked off to, not willing to bother with it. 

He walks back in the direction of his room, but instead of flopping on his bed he flops on the couch in the living room, turning on the TV and flipping through the channels. There wasn’t anything good to watch, so he settled on _Fresh Prince of Bel Air_ reruns and settled in, thoughts of roommates vanishing from his mind. 

It was a few episodes later, long enough that his eyelids were starting to weigh down and he was pleasantly walking the line of being asleep and being awake when Lip walked in. 

He was dripping wet and out of breath, a box under his arm falling apart due to the nature of soggy paper. 

“Where the fuck even were you?” Ian asked through a yawn. 

“Had to run some errands.” 

“Are we calling fucking Tami ‘running errands’ now?” 

Lip threw his wet backpack onto Ian’s crotch. “No dickbag, I was running errands for the company. I have to deliver this package tomorrow but uh,” he picked up the box and rotated it in his hands, “I don’t think they’re gonna want it anymore.” He sets the package down on the kitchen counter, effectively getting the tile soaked. 

Ian hums in response, so tired he can feel his bones relaxing and molding with the couch cushions. 

Lip stands there, staring at him pointedly. Why, Ian didn’t know, but he didn’t much care for his brother towering over his melting body. 

“So,” he said with a clap of his hands, like some sort of over excited high school teacher who really believes he can make a difference in his students’ lives, “did you get any applications?” 

Ian groans. He fights the urge to lie and say no, tell Lip no one wants to live in a tiny apartment without a room. He wants to tell him he only received nudes in his inbox, but Lip knows his password, so he would know immediately whether he was lying or not. 

Instead of answering Lip’s question, he brought out a new one- 

“Why do we need a roommate anyway? Why can’t you just fucking get a job?” Ian wasn’t pissed, per say, but he wasn’t zealous either. He wished, for what felt like the millionth time, that his brother talked to him in matters that involved him. 

Like every time he tried to set Ian up with one of his coworkers, only for it to end with that coworker hating Lip because Ian doesn’t do dating. 

“I can’t get a fucking job because I’m always busy at that goddamn internship, you know this shit stop being an ass about it.” 

“Aren’t you the one always saying you’re gonna get a job there? And then you’ll make real money? Where’s the real money, Lip?” He was sitting up now, the exhaustion being sucked out of him from the bickering with his brother. He had one eyebrow raised challengingly, taunting his brother all the more. 

Lip made his way over and smacked him hard in the arm. 

“I’m fuckin’ workin’ on that, but if I get a job somewhere else it’ll look like I’m a traitor to the company.” 

“I’m pretty sure interns can have part time jobs. The convenience store is hiring cashiers,” he said with an innocent smile. 

“I’m not gonna be a cashier and earn seven dollars an hour when I could focus on the internship and eventually make more than Fiona did selling those fucking cups.” He fishes out a cigarette from his pocket and moves to open the window. 

That’s Ian’s least favorite part about not living in a bigger house- they have to open the windows to smoke otherwise they can’t fucking breathe. Back at home they’d just leave the door open and hope the smoke wafted to another part of the house. 

“The cashier job actually pays eleven an hour, because of, you know, the law. It’s not in the sketchiest part of town so they actually have to abide by what the lawmakers say. It’s not like back home where the cashier job at that weird pedo’s store paid me seven an hour like we lived in fucking Texas.” 

Lip laughs. Well, he does a half chuckle, but Lip only laughs when he’s making fun of someone, so Ian’s taking it as a win. 

“As convincing as that is, little brother, I’d rather not. A roommate is easier and it would mean what you pay decreases so you’d have more to spend on your geriatric boyfriends.” 

“First of all- they’re not my boyfriends, and they’re the ones paying for _my_ shit. And yeah, sure, I agree that having a roommate might be easier, so long as they sleep with you.” 

“No fuckin’ way. Tami’s over all the time. I'm not expelling our roommate every other day just so I can bone her.” 

“What if I want to bring someone home?” Ian fired back, annoyed at his brother’s lack of consideration. 

“You never bring anyone home, and if you want to you can just go to his house. Knowing your type he probably has something you can steal and sell later.” 

“How come you can’t go to Tami’s house? And get fucked, if I decide to steal something it won’t be because it was your brilliant idea.” 

“I can’t go to Tami’s because she’s got a fuckin’ roommate.” 

“And soon you will too! Twins!” He smiled at Lip as he got up from the couch, taking the cigarette from his hands, taking a drag and then giving it back to Lip. 

He let the smoke sit in his lungs for a minute, letting the smoke fill him up in ways he couldn’t. He exhaled once he got to his room, watching as the smoke filled it and then faded away. 

He didn’t want to think about the person he’d be sharing his room with. He knew there was no point in arguing, he tried (and failed) and trying again would just mean failing again, and he doesn’t have it in him to bother.

He feels bad for the poor fucker, because whoever it is, Ian can already tell he won’t like them. He’s gonna feel bad about it, but that isn’t going to stop him from being a dick, anyways. 

+++

He’s standing in the kitchen, making enough coffee for the entire south side, when Lip walks out of his room. His t-shirt has so many holes it’s more empty space than fabric, and Ian’s pretty sure the boxers he’s wearing are his. 

He offers his brother a mug filled with coffee noncommittally, and Lip responds with a grunt in thanks. 

It works, this system of theirs. They both seem to enjoy quiet mornings, a direct dichotomy from the chaos of their life in Chicago. The silence stretches comfortably, each boy moving around the kitchen with practiced ease, swerving around one another without even blinking. 

Ian doesn’t know how a third person would fit into this. How loud they would be, how disruptive. 

He doesn’t want to find out. 

It’s as they’re finishing up their breakfast, both of their chairs angled to look out the window, the city barely visible through the autumn fog, that Lip brings up the applications. Ian’s still tired, but if he had the energy for it he would be rolling his eyes. As it is, though, he doesn’t. He just sighs and turns to face his brother. 

“There was one you didn’t open. Why?” 

Ian gulps down the rest of his coffee before answering. 

“I was tired and I didn’t want to risk another dick pick. Do we have to talk about this now? Let’s not ruin the whole fucking day at half past eight in the morning, please,” he said as he moved to put his dishes away in the sink. 

“Well, I opened it because, unlike you, I have a huge thing for dicks, y’know?” Ian chuckled at the implications. “And this guy didn’t uh… he didn’t seem so bad, yeah? I think you should look at his application first before, uh, judging him too harshly.” 

Ian mumbled under his breath his resentment, but sat down beside Lip who was pulling up the computer, anyway. 

He watched Lip pull up the email, and was immediately drawn to the picture of the guy. He was posing with his fists up to the camera, fuck u-up tattooed oh so delicately across his knuckles. The rest of the man was attractive, Ian will admit, but he couldn’t get over the knuckle tattoos. There’s only so much teasing eyebrows and blue eyes can compensate for, and tattoos that transport him back to the southside pass the limit. 

“... and he’s an English major at Hunter College. Dunno what the fuck you could do with an English degree but, hey, to each his own.” 

“Huh?” 

“Did you listen to a single fucking word I just said?” 

“Do I ever?” 

“Alright dickbag, read over it yourself.” He pushed the computer over to Ian and pulled a cigarette from the pack on the table. Ian watched as his brother took a drag before offering it to him. He took it as he looked over “fuck u-up”’s fuckin’ resume. 

He was an English major, that much he heard from Lip, and he grew up in the Bronx (South Bronx to be specific. Ian didn’t know that much about the different boroughs of New York, but he hasn’t heard much good about the southern part of the Bronx. But then again, it’s not like he grew up in the good part of Chicago). 

The guy seemed fine, he said he smoked but Lip put that they were drug use friendly in the ad, anyways. 

The guy seemed fine, but Ian could tell he wouldn’t like him. He seemed too angry, like the guys that used to beat him up for being a fag in high school. 

He scrolled down to see what the guy's name was and saw the email was signed by Mickey Milkovich. 

He stared at the screen, looking at the name staring back at him and decided he probably wouldn’t be friends with him and his fists and his South Bronx attitude. 

He nodded at Lip, though, saying this was probably their best bet, and no matter how much he already disliked this Milkovich guy, he couldn’t deny the fact that they needed the money. He’d grin and bear it if he had to, no matter how much he’d dislike it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter one and done!! this is my longest fic so far ive already got 50k of it written so expect updates soon :) please leave a comment and a kudos if u like it it means a lot to me


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> mickey's here!! him and ian don't like each other. homophobic language tw

He will not ‘grin and bear it’. 

He’s realizing this rapidly. Mickey is sitting at the third and final chair in their kitchen, twirling a spoon in his coffee mug because the nut job likes fucking milk in his coffee. If he was from the South Side he would get his face beat in for that. Must be nice being from New York. 

It’s like everything this guy does aggravates him. His nails tapping on the side of his mug, his leg bouncing brushing up against the wall, the way he slurps his coffee. Every little thing is beginning to drive him nuts. No fucking way is he rooming with this guy. 

And on top of that- he just seems so fake. His happy answers to all of Lip’s questions when he’s clearly a grumpy motherfucker seem so fabricated, like this is an audition and he’s who they ought to cast.

The worst part of everything was when he referred to this guy he used to be friends with as a ‘faggot’. Ian couldn’t sleep in the same room as a homophobe, and this guy had all the makings of one. The muscle tank and the hideous jeans and the beat up sneakers and the distasteful tattoos. Ian knows people like him, he knows how they react when there’s a gay guy around. He can’t even imagine what it would be like if they had to share the same room, fill up the same spaces. 

But Lip seems to like him, and it’s technically his apartment, so there isn’t much that Ian can do. 

He watches carefully, stares at Mickey with his eyebrows furrowed. He catches Mickey’s confusion filled glances that he keeps sending his way, clearly wondering why he won’t look away, but that just makes Ian stare harder. 

Ian leaves before the conversation between Lip and Mickey finishes. He doesn’t want to listen to his brother bond with the dirtiest white boy Ian’s ever seen. He doesn’t care to listen to them laugh over stories about little sisters and big families and absentee fathers. He doesn’t want to have things in common with Mickey. 

It’s a few minutes later that Ian hears a knock on his door. He assumes it’s just Lip telling him Mickey’s left, so he shouts from behind the door “has he finally left?” 

Only to open his door to find Mickey’s toilet cleaner blue eyes staring right back at him.

“No he fuckin’ hasn’t.” And, yeah, Ian was right- this guy seems like a total dick. 

Mickey pushes past him to look at the room, Lip droning in the background about how they would put a mattress on the floor ‘here, beside Ian’s bed’ and how he could have half the closet (which Ian protested because that was absolutely not discussed). 

Mickey seemed satisfied- Ian did not. He kept hoping rats would swarm out from underneath the bed so it could scare Mickey away, but he had no such luck. 

Mickey and Lip walked out, Mickey saying something about how he would be over sometime soon to move in with his things. 

Ian groaned as loudly as he could, not ready to add another person to have to navigate around in their already cramped space.

And _God_ it couldn’t be literally any body fucking else? Ian will scam rich old men if Lip wants, anything to get the world’s grungiest homophobe out of his bedroom. What’s he gonna do when he brings a guy home? Put up with Mickey’s disgust and horror? Put up with losing a roommate and therefore losing money? 

And, sure, he may not have a Tami that comes over to suck his dick every forty five seconds, but he has a right hand and a bottle of lube that gets put to use quite frequently, and he doesn’t want to change his habits because of Mickey. 

This is going to effectively ruin his life. 

But he’s still going to be at least mildly helpful. He starts refolding his clothes so they take up less space, since now half of _his_ closet isn’t his anymore, he moves his shoes to a corner, piles them up on top of each other. He takes everything he owns and shrinks it down to a size that accommodates two people. 

He goes to his window and forces it open, letting the cool October air waft into his bedroom. He stands there imagining how pleasant it would be to open a window and overlook hills or the ocean or the woods. How nice it would be to smell the air sticky with salt from the sea. The air that pours into his bedroom smells vaguely of charcoal and something foul, be it trash or urine he can’t really tell. He leaves the window open anyways, happy to stand by it and let the wind brush through his hair and across his features. 

He finds himself chastising himself for being worried over this roommate, how privileged he is to think of this space as only his. Back home, all the boys were stuffed into the same room, and, sure, it was an inconvenience, but they managed. He lives in a city brimming with opportunity in an apartment with his brother where he has his own room. 

Two years ago, he didn’t even allow himself to think of this as a possibility. 

It’s selfish not wanting to share this room with Mickey, he knows that. 

But every time he thinks of the man he’s reminded of the way his lips curled around the word _faggot_ with practiced ease like it meant nothing. Sure, Ian’s thrown around the word a couple of times before himself, but it’s different. When he says it, it doesn’t come from a place of disgust, a place of mockery.

It felt like kind cruelty from Mickey. It was said in the _I know gay people but I don’t like them_ sort of way. Like he would beat the fag out of someone but only because he wanted to secure their spot in heaven. It reminded him of Roger, and that was something he didn’t like to think about. 

Before Caleb, there was Roger Spikey. Him and Ian grew up together, playing on the little league baseball team as kids, finding each other girls to take to the middle school dances. He was the first boy that ever made Ian feel like there was more to the world than weed and porn magazines. Roger made him giddy, made his stomach a butterfly sanctuary, made him feel in ways he wasn’t supposed to. 

They got high, Roger sucked him off in the back of his car. Ian thought all of the cosmic entities were coming together at that moment. 

And then Roger never spoke to him again. Told the whole school Ian tried to suck him off, called him a ‘fucking fag’ as he pushed him into the lockers. Never admitted to the fact that he sucked Ian off first, and that he didn’t even ask him to reciprocate. 

Ian would take the pain of being pushed into the walls and thrown onto the ground if it meant never feeling the betrayal he felt ever again. 

But he’s not some pussy. He can take homophobia. He tends to tower over people, he works out, and he grew up having to physically fight people just so he could live another day. He can fight people who hate queers, that’s nothing special. 

He just doesn’t want to deal with that shit in his own goddamn house. 

And he definitely won’t be dealing with that shit from Mickey Milkovich, who’s about four feet tall, and infuriating. 

He voices his complaints to Lip, who simply laughs around the cigarette in his mouth and rolls his eyes heavenward. Ian crosses his arms over his chest, playing the role of petulant little brother so Lip will stop laughing at his agony. 

Lip laughs anyway. Naturally- the dick. 

“Ian, man, the guy’s cool. A little bit of an ass, yeah, alright but it’s not like we’re any fucking better. He comes from a shit hole family just like us, except he grew up in New York instead of fuckin’ South Side Chicago.” 

“Lip, he’s homophobic. Kept calling his friends faggots and tossing around slurs I haven’t heard since we moved out here.” 

Lip scoffs, getting up to fetch a beer for him and Ian. He nudges Ian with his elbow as he moves past him. 

“Maybe they were fags.” 

“Fuck you.” 

“Not into guys, Ian, that’s your thing,” he calls from the kitchen. 

“Eat a dick, Lip,” he called back. 

Lip comes back with two beers and hands one to Ian, mumbling _‘What did I_ just _say?’_ under his breath as he walked past. 

Ian chooses not to respond, knowing there’s no point. He watches as Lip turns on the TV and settles on a baseball game. Ian doesn’t care enough to notice what team. 

He, instead, watches the sky slowly paint itself hues of purple and orange blending together beyond the city skyscrapers. He wants to chase it. Wants to run off the edge of the Earth and into an expanse of sky that he’s positive would cradle him if he fell. 

It would make everything so much easier. He wouldn’t have to worry about making enough to eat and he wouldn’t have to worry about whether or not Carl’s being killed in the alley behind a grungy pub or having to make sure Fiona has enough to keep Liam alive. 

He has moments, few and far between, where he feels like he could reach the clouds, if only he jumped high enough. Moments that feel so special and so… his and his alone that they almost feel holy. They fill him with the energy necessary to chase the edge of the Earth. He could spend hours awake, figuring out how fast he’d need to run to fly if he jumped off a building. 

Walking seems so trivial sometimes. He doesn’t understand why he’s the only one with the urge to fly away from it. 

Fiona says it’s the bipolar talking, that Monica did the same things. She’d be asleep on the couch one day and telling everyone she was the second coming of Jesus the next. 

How glorious she must’ve felt, Ian always thinks. 

He doesn’t see how it’s such a problem. He’s not any worse than anybody else. He’s just one of the lucky ones. One of the few that get to experience life the way he does- vividly. Brilliantly. He doesn’t understand how something so integrated into his being can be so harmful.

It’s the most powerful drug he’s ever taken, and he hates throwing it away. 

The sky reminds him of the days he wasn’t on lithium and abilify and lamictal. It reminds him of when things were colorful- when things were bright and made of manic laughter. 

He wants to either live in the sky or drink it. Put the clouds in a blender with milk and turn it into a smoothie. See if he can drink the high into his body. 

He would be genuinely content being manic for the rest of his life. The world spins so quickly and everything is so wonderful, everything feels floaty and like it’s made out of soft metal- malleable and pliant, but still resistant to the rain. 

He feels fireproof, like he could strike a match on his abdomen and set it to his hair and walk around ablaze. He feels invincible and he guesses that’s the problem. No one likes to deal with invincibility, it’s no fun when you can’t be controlled. 

When he was sixteen the doctors put him on just lamictal, not wanting to overwhelm him with drugs. It was an average dose, nothing too crazy, and it made him sick to his stomach. He didn’t like that he couldn’t feel anything.

That’s the worst feeling in the world- feeling so much it accounts for everyone in your neighborhood one day, and the next feeling like the world when the sky is grey and everything gets cast in a monotonous shadow. 

He stopped taking them, didn’t even last two full months before he flushed all his pills down the toilet. It was stupid, to him, especially back then when he thought he didn’t actually have a problem, that it was everyone else who had an issue. 

It wasn’t until Monica whisked him away that he realized how many problems it caused. How disruptive it could be. He always hated his parents for abandoning them and he didn’t like the idea that he, too, was capable of the same thing. 

So he let Fiona take him back to the psychiatrist, he allowed his body to be dragged by his foot throughout the city so he could get the right medication. They prescribed lithium and abilify on top of the lamictal, and it worked. He can feel and emote and see colors even if they’re not as bright as they used to be. 

He still smokes weed and gets drunk and fucks with the lithium levels in his bloodstream. He still has episodes where everything is cast in shadow and his body is paralyzed and then others where he flies into the Sun. 

He hates that he gets so into all his feelings just by looking at a fucking sunset, but he figures that’s life sometimes. Chaotic and unexplainable. 

He would know. 

+++

Two days go by before he even hears of Mickey again. He’s fine with it. In fact, he’s more than content not having to worry about that muscle tank wearing asshole and what he’s up to. 

He barely even thought about him. 

And then he walked into Ian’s convenience store. 

He didn’t notice him at first. Maybe because he was in a black button down and dress pants, hair combed back neatly, maybe because Ian simply wasn’t expecting to see him at all. 

But as he made his way around the store, throwing things in his basket that didn’t look like they had any correlation with one another- a bottle of wine here, gummy worms there, he began to recognize parts of him that looked familiar. 

The blue eyes that were drained of life, the judgemental eyebrows, the fuck u-up tattoo on his knuckles. 

Mickey turned around in the aisle and instantly their eyes locked. Ian might’ve been projecting his own distaste, but he swears Mickey’s eyes narrowed as soon as he recognized who Ian was. That, or he needed glasses. 

“Aren’t you supposed to fuckin’ help the customer?” 

“Aren’t you supposed to be a little nicer to the guy who’s letting you sleep in his room?” he responded with a saccharine smile. 

“Fuck you, Gallagher.”

“I got other guys for that,” he made sure to emphasize the guys, better to get that out in the open than wait for Mickey to figure it out on his own time. 

He doesn’t do much other than scoff and roll his eyes, which does much to deny Ian’s suspicions that he doesn’t do queers. 

Fiona would scoff at him for being so judgemental, spewing some bullshit about how he should know better than anyone not to assume things about people before getting to know them. 

Fiona would say many things, but Fiona isn’t here right now, so Ian feels like he’s free to do whatever he wants. 

And whatever he wants currently includes glaring at the man taking as long as possible to pick out a cereal bar, the smug look on his face meaning he must know the store is going to close soon, so he’s prolonging that reality for as long as he possibly can. 

Ian grunts from his place behind the register, eager to get home so he can eat the pizza in the oven he hopes Lip hasn’t stolen. 

Mickey seems intent on not letting that happen, though, reading the ingredients off the back of every container, even things he has clearly no intention of buying. He picks up baby snacks and tampons, reads over the writing before placing them both back down on the shelf.

Next to each other, when baby food goes in the opposite end of the store. 

“Are you fucking done?” Ian barks, not wanting to deal with Mickey’s idling any longer. It was either he buy the damn products, or he leaves. And Ian was really hoping he would leave. 

“Fuck you, Gallagher, I’m gonna take my damn time. You don’t own this place!” he responded with a grin that said _fuck you_ more than verbalizing the phrase ever would. 

“I own where you’re about to live so I’d watch it.” If anyone else looked at Ian, six feet tall and built of muscle, standing tall with his arms crossed over his chest, they’d be worried. As it is, Mickey just raises an eyebrow and scoffs at him. Ian hears him chuckle softly under his breath. 

It’s another twenty minutes before Mickey decides he’s finished. The store closed fifteen minutes ago, and Ian’s patience is thinner than it was before, stretched like Italian spaghetti. 

Mickey dumps his items on the counter unceremoniously. 

“And a pack of marlboros.” 

Ian doesn’t look up from where he’s ringing up Mickey’s items, “ID, please.” He doesn’t have to watch Mickey to see the way his eyes roll. 

“C’mon man-” 

“Company policy says we gotta ID someone when they look thirteen.” 

“A’ight fuck you and your fuckin’ policies here’s the ID,” he says as he reaches his hand in to his front pocket. 

“How many cuss words do they allow you to write in your essays?” 

“Listen- I get it. You don’t fuckin’ like me. Well guess what, red! I don’t think you’re hot shit either. So give me my fucking shit and stop pesterin’ me and we’ll be fine.” Ian chooses not to point out the fact that the only reason they’re still here getting on each other's nerves is because Mickey decided it would be fun to take as long as humanly possible in the world's shittiest bodega. 

Ian’s pretty sure Mickey doesn’t even live around here.

Yet. 

“Alright…” he takes a look at Mickey’s ID, “Mikhalio? Your name’s Mikhailo Milkovich.” Ian fights the urge not to laugh. It makes sense that God’s punishing him with a name like that. 

“At least it’s not Ian Gallagher,” Mickey says as he grabs the plastic bags with all of his things from Ian’s hands. Mickey smiles, and it almost looks genuine, the way it reaches his eyes. Even Ian’s got to admit that the guy has a nice smile, it would make him look kind if not for the annoying glint in his eyes.

“Have a _great_ night,” Ian tells him as he walks out. Mickey flips him off. 

Ian trails behind him, finally turning the _Open_ sign to the side that declares they’re closed. If someone desperately needs a candy bar at this hour there’s a Walgreens two blocks away, but Kash and Grab was closed for the night.

He finished putting everything away and locking all the doors that needed to be locked. It was as he was standing outside, locking the front door, that his phone started ringing. He let it ring for a few seconds, waiting to make sure the person wasn’t going to hang up before pulling the phone out of his back pocket. The caller ID said it was Debbie, who was probably calling as a butt dial or because Liam wanted to talk and she was babysitting him. It’s rare Debbie’s the one that calls; Ian’s always felt like the protective big brother figure, but still- he and Debbie were never as close as they could’ve been. 

He answers, hoping for good news. Maybe his sister just misses him.

“Debs?” 

“Hey, Ian.” 

The fact that she was calling on purpose made him grin. He misses his family, his heart aches for them more than he’d ever care to admit. They were, quite literally, his people. They supported him when no one else ever did, took care of him when he was too tired to take care of himself. It’s always a nice surprise when they call, as usually Ian is the one reaching out. 

Carl contacts him the most, he has questions about being a boy that he’s too afraid to ask Fiona. Ian’s favorite being when he called to ask if getting a boner while watching Fast and Furious made him gay. 

Ian laughed good naturedly and said no, that itdoesn’t make it gay. 

The empty feeling in his heart expanded like drops of ink moving to take up the entire page. 

“Hey Debs,” he sighed, sinking into his posture. He doesn’t know why she was calling so late, especially considering the fact that she had school tomorrow, and she really cared about doing well. Something about being class president in middle school that she held onto into the tenth grade. 

“Ian I- there’s something I wanted to talk to you about.” Her voice was shaky, warbling around the vowels and consonants. Ian expected the worst- an _I’m pregnant_ or _Dad’s dying again_. The former concerned him more than the latter. 

“Go ahead,” he said as he turned on his heel and began the walk home. “I’m walking home so I can’t promise my connection won’t be complete shit, by the way.” He smiled as he spoke, Debbie being a relief from the previous stresses of that afternoon. 

“I kissed a girl.” 

Ian freezes, he doesn’t know how to react. This can’t be an _I kissed a girl at a party_ type of confession, her words were pushed out too quickly and too anxiously for that to be the case. But he can’t imagine this being Debbie coming out, either. 

Really, he was so focused on his coming out growing up, he never even fathomed the possibility of any of his siblings going through the same thing. 

He reacts the way he knows she’s probably hoping for. 

“Yeah?” 

Simple, unstated, but so much meaning, so many questions behind that one word. 

“Yeah.” 

And there it is. That’s her coming out. Ian isn’t the only queer Gallagher, anymore. Well- he figures, now, that he never was. Debbie didn’t decide to be gay prior to this conversation, these are probably queeries she’s had for as long as she can remember, they’re simply only coming to a head now. 

“Well, how was it?” He started to pick up the pace, eager to get home so he could sit and give her his full attention. 

“I- I don’t know.” Ian feels for her, heart stretching its hands out to Chicago so he could wrap her up in its arms. He wishes, for what feels like the millionth time since he moved, that he could have the rest of his siblings near him.

It’s so heartbreaking feeling tired of the chaos in the city that never sleeps, he feels like he’s letting all of New York down.

It’s silent for a minute, neither of them saying anything, and then Debbie speaks up, voice so quiet he wouldn’t have heard her if he wasn’t listening to every quivering breath. 

“I liked it.” It was as soft-spoken as a Gallagher could get. Ian could picture her clearly, hunched over herself in her bedroom, hand playing with her hair, an anxious habit they all picked up from Fiona. “I liked it more than kissing boys.” 

Ian gasps incredulously, “how can it be better than boys?” he says, a weak attempt at lightening the mood, but it pulls a shaky laugh out of Debbie, so he considers it a win. 

“Shut up, asshole. I’m trying to tell you I think I’m a lesbian and you’re making jokes and oh wow I’ve never said that out loud before.” 

“How does it feel?” It could feel one of two ways- it could make her body itch, pull her apart from every corner and rearrange her in a way that’s so uncomfortable that it just feels _right_ , or it could make her feel nothing at all. 

“Weird. _Good_ , but weird.” 

“The first time’s always the weirdest.” 

“How, uhm, how was your first coming out?”

Ian chuckles, remembering how he never really got to come out the first time, that Lip just found his porn and called him out on it. 

He starts telling the story as he unlocks the door to his apartment, finding Lip in the kitchen. He watched as nostalgic recognition washed over his features at Ian’s words. “Well, I didn’t really get to come out on my own time. See, your dickface older brother _Lip_ ,” he said pointedly, staring his brother down, “found my porn magazines and called me out on it in the middle of the night. But my coming out to Fiona was pretty smooth: I just told her that I was gay and she went _I know_ and we moved on.” 

“Have you ever had a bad experience?” she asked tentatively. 

“I mean, I got beat up a lot? If that counts.” 

Debbie sighs heavily, voice going quiet. “Will that happen to me?” 

Ian debates telling her that, no, she’ll be fine. That times have changed since he was fifteen, that shit’s not so bad anymore. 

He doesn’t want to lie to her, though. 

“I dunno, Debs. Some people are gonna be huge fuckin’ dicks about it, but you’ve got us yeah? You’ll be fine.” 

He could hear Debbie’s smile in the words she spoke, a gentle, “thanks, Ian.” 

“Anytime.” They didn’t need to say _goodbye_ or _talk to you later_. Conversation would come again when it did, Ian wasn’t going to be one to rush it. 

He was about to press the _end call_ button when Debbie went “Wait! Don’t tell Lip please?” It was phrased as a question, as if she was worried Ian would say no. 

“Of course.” 

“Thanks. Again.” She laughed sheepishly, and hung up the call, leaving Ian with a heart warmer than the iron of the fire escape on summer afternoons. 

“Was that Debs?” Lip asked. Ian nodded, the desire to tell his brother everything strong, but he wasn’t going to betray Debbie like that. That was her information to share, not his. 

“What did she want?” 

“Weirdly enough, she was just asking about how we were doing. Must be on her period or something the girl seemed emotional.” 

“Ew, man, don’t talk about that shit.” 

“What- periods?”

“Yeah, dude, fuckin’ nasty.”

“You’re grossed out by periods yet you’re the one who dates women. I should be the straight one.” 

“No way, you know I could never put shit up my ass.” 

“It’s not like I do.” 

“Oh fuck you Ian can we _please_ not talk about your bedroom preferences? For my sake? Fuckin’ gross, man.” 

Ian smiled, pulling a cigarette from the pack in his pocket that he stole from work. He cocked his head to the side, signaling to Lip that he was going to smoke out on the fire escape. Lip nodded, and made no move to get up and go with him, so Ian assumed he was going to smoke alone.

The night was cold. Cold enough that Ian pulled his sweatshirt tighter, wrapping it around his body. October was kind to New York, turned its colors warm and golden, made it glisten in the fading afternoon light.

Nights were cold, but not bitterly so. It was cold in the way that water is cold after you chew mint gum- the coolness welcome and expected. 

Ian spent some time thinking about everything and nothing. Thoughts changing with every smokey exhale. His mind wandered back to Debbie, who was so cautious with her words like she was afraid she would cut her tongue on them. He can’t say he’s shocked, she always had an aversion to anything related to Ian and his boyfriends, but not in a way rooted in disgust, but in a way that was rooted in fear. Fear of being that way, too. 

He wonders who she kissed. Wonders who turned her world upside down. 

He wishes his story was soft and sweet. That it wasn’t so raunchy. Debbie deserves someone who loves her sweetly, someone who falls at her feet in adoration. Ian wishes it for himself, too, but he only admits that on nights like these- nights where the moon is dragging his secrets out of him. 

He’s sworn off love, romance, dating, the lot. But when he sees Lip and Tami sat on the couch together or Fiona and her boyfriends that were constantly walking in and out of their lives, he wishes he hadn’t. 

A part of him is a hopeless romantic. A part of him believes in love. 

He can’t help but think any guy could be _it_ , _him_. The one that sweeps him off his feet and carries him into the setting sun, but the reality is that that doesn’t happen. Not to people like him, at least. Ian’s too fucked up. He’s messy, he’s difficult, his mood goes back and forth like a child trying to see if it can loop the swings around the bar holding it. No one should be burdened with that. 

He used to think others were the problem. Back when he was younger and it was a string of messy boyfriends, he just thought he had bad taste. It wasn’t until he moved to New York and had one of his many shitty boyfriends cuss him out for being too complicated that he realized _he_ was the common denominator. 

He tried his best to hold in his tears that night, but he soaked his pillow anyways. It was one thing having people not like you because you chewed too loudly or didn’t shower enough. 

The heartbreak of having people dislike you because of something you were born with, because of a chemical fucking imbalance in your brain was something else all together. 

He spent some time after that guy doing his best to control it. He didn’t drink and he didn’t smoke and he couldn’t feel a damn thing. Everything was lifeless. That’s when Ian decided he wouldn’t sacrifice who he was for other people, it was too draining (even though, really, everything is). Instead, he figured he would wait for the person who didn’t treat his disorder like it would kill them. He wanted someone who didn’t traipse on eggshells every time they were around him. 

His heart felt heavy, the way it did whenever he thought about things of this nature. It sunk to his feet and fell through the grated floor of the fire escape and onto the ground seven stories below him.

If he listened closely, he could hear the wet slap of it hitting the asphalt. 

He wanted to lie down and sleep, then. Body so numb it was no longer quivering in the wind. Cigarette long gone. He wished he could dream, just once, of nice things. Of fucking meadows and fruity shit. He’d take memories and dreams about his parents over nightmares and empty minds. 

He sighed, turning and forcing the window back open so he could crawl inside.

He pulled his clothes off slowly, toeing off his shoes as he tugged his sweater over his head. Ian stripped down to his boxers before crawling into bed. 

His head hit the pillow softly as his eyes whispered shut. 

He fell asleep, and dreamt of nothing. 

+++

Ian woke up at half past noon the next day. He was lucky he wasn’t scheduled to work, because he felt like his entire apartment complex was sitting on his chest. 

He gets like that sometimes, maybe last night on the fire escape messed with his head a little bit, maybe this dip was inevitable- he doesn’t know. All he knows is that he doesn’t feel like he can breathe at that moment, and his body felt tired, it ached. 

He scolded his brain for the hundredth time since he was diagnosed. He cursed his mind out for not behaving like it should (he figures, though, that his mind _is_ behaving like it should. It’s just not how he wants it to). 

Ian manages to find the strength to get up out of bed. He finds Lip still at home, which is curious because normally, on an average tuesday, he would be out trailing behind smart men in suits with a notepad jotting down everything they do and want. 

Or whatever he actually does. 

“Uh mornin’. There’s eggs on the stove but they’ve probably gone a bit cold.” Ian nodded and grabbed a plate from the cupboards, piling some eggs on it and putting it in the microwave. He leaned his head against the refrigerator as he waited for the thirty seconds to be up. 

Lip was looking at him quizzically, concern explicit on all his features. 

“Are you okay, man? Do we need to get your meds adjusted? _Are_ you taking your meds?” 

Ian shrugged, debating whether or not he should answer verbally. The shrug did nothing to quell Lip’s insecurities. He mumbled his response, telling Lip that he was fine, that the meds were fine, and reassuring him of the fact that he hasn’t skipped a dose since he was eighteen. 

This seemed to sate Lip for a bit, but his leg was still bouncing with nervous energy, which meant he was still worried about Ian. 

Ian gets it, he’s gotten low before. Low to the point where Fiona had everyone hide the knives and they had to send him back to a mental hospital. This one long term. It was a residential treatment center in Cook county. He stayed for two and a half months, which was short compared to others, but he felt like there were bugs starting to crawl into his brain from how monotonous it was. He was glad to be out. 

So he gets Lip’s concern, but it still gets on his nerves that his family doesn’t trust him to deal with the disorder by himself. 

“Y’know I- I walked into your room and, uh, you were still asleep? And I know talking about it gets on your nerves, man, I get it but I worry about you, Ian. We’re all the family we got right now. We gotta look out for each other, alright?” 

“Yeah, Lip. I know,” he breathed out, voice low and tinged with sleep. 

A beat of silence. Ian looked at Lip who clearly had something to say but was holding back. Why, he didn’t know.

“Just say it, Lip.” 

“I talked to Mickey yesterday. He’s uh… he’s moving in tomorrow.” 

Ian didn’t react. He just nodded, trying to collect his thoughts so tears wouldn’t start tracking down his cheeks in frustration. 

“Why?” Was the only thing he managed to come up with. 

“W-what do you mean _why?_ He’s our roommate. He’s gonna live here what part of that is too fuckin’ hard to understand?” Lip asked incredulously, like that shit was just supposed to be obvious. (It is obvious, but not right now. In that moment everything felt like it needed an explanation, like it needed to be spelled out for him to understand). 

“He couldn’t have given us a week’s notice?” 

“I’m assuming he needed a place to live pretty desperately if he chose our shit show apartment, so, no, probably not.” 

_“Fuck me,”_ Ian sighed, getting up slowly and putting his plate in the sink and retreating back to his bedroom, not letting Lip finish their conversation. 

He crawls back into bed, the stress of everything piling up. He doesn’t want a new roommate- he wants Lip to get a fucking job. 

The walls feel like they’re closing in on him, and he feels his heart rate start to speed up, running like Secretariat on his tracks, a beast of an organ. His breathing starts to become erratic. He knows what this is, has felt it many times before. He wants to bring it back down, he wants to ground himself. But that feels impossible. 

So he lets the walls close around him and he lets his lungs shut down. He closes his eyes and plays dead, waits for the room to grow back to it’s normal size again. 

He knows it’ll happen eventually, and maybe when it does he’ll be smart enough to get out of bed and go for a walk. Maybe go to a park or up to Manhattan so he can walk around and pretend like his life isn’t falling apart for the day.

The odds of that happening are low, but one is allowed to be idealistic, he figures. 

He spends the rest of the afternoon staring at his ceiling, cataloging the stains into categories- which ones look like faces, which ones look like animals, and which ones look like penises. 

A lot of them look like penises. 

As funny as the ceiling penises are when he’s high, right now it’s doing nothing for him. He feels pointless, like nothing he does is worth anything. 

Look at him- he’s following his brother like a lost puppy, living in his shadow because he was too mentally ill to be in the army and too stupid to go to college and too… much for anybody to want him. The only things he does well is get high and sleep, maybe it’s because that’s what he has the most practice with. 

He wants to fall asleep, wants to let his subconscious take over and he wants to succumb to sleep like he used to when he was little. His sleep is restless now, even when his depression causes him to sleep all day. It’s clouded with nightmares and visions of something happening to his family. He wakes up at three am in a cold sweat most nights from dreams of army guards pushing the barrel of a gun into his forehead, the metal cold, his body shaking. He knows nothing will happen, but he can’t help but worry. 

What if they want more from him? More than what he gave?

Sometimes it’s dreams of his time at the Fairytale. Men taking him home after he passed out and his family never seeing him again. 

Most of the time, though, it’s about his family. It’s them getting separated again due to the child protective services and never finding one another. It’s Liam dying in the emergency room after he got into Fiona’s drugs. It’s Debbie getting pregnant and Carl getting shot- 

He shouldn’t allow his thoughts to go down that path. It’ll just force him deeper down. 

He checks his phone and there’s a reminder on his phone that says _Elaine @6:15._ He doesn’t know whether or not he should be happy about that. 

On one hand, it would certainly be in his best interest to get up out of bed, especially to go to therapy, and if he went they wouldn’t have to pay the cancellation fee.

Frank, weirdly enough, is the one who pays for it. After Fiona beat him with a bat, he started splitting his disability checks with Ian so he could pay for therapy. He only goes once a month, it’s all they can afford, but he likes it. He likes Elaine and her office is welcoming: a big blue couch and paintings everywhere with inspirational quotes. She has a wall full of pictures of beaches and mountains and places she visited with her therapist money. 

She listens to him, and, sure, that’s her _job_ but he never feels like their conversations burden her in any way. 

So he gets up, takes off his sweatpants and puts on a pair of ratty old jeans so old he’s pretty sure Lip had them when he was fifteen. There are holes in the knees and patches by his thighs where the fabric has worn away. They’re his favorite pair of jeans and if he concentrates hard enough he can still smell the fabric softener Fiona used to use, the scent clinging desperately to the garment. 

He wraps himself up, always wanting to be warm when he’s like this. 

He says a quick goodbye to Lip and takes the stairs down to the floor of his apartment complex. 

The walk to the subway goes by faster than usual, his pace quick against the wind. You’d think he’d be used to the wind and cold temperature, growing up in Chicago and all, but his need to be warm is overwhelming. 

He waits patiently for his train to come, hopping on when it arrives. It takes a while to get to Manhattan from Brooklyn, so he waits, eyes closed and head against the window. 

He’s made this trek enough that he doesn’t have to keep his eyes open to watch for the stops, he simply listens to movement of people walking in and out of the doors every time the train stops. Once he’s passed seven stops he opens his eyes and stands up, moving to walk towards the doors. 

He’s near Union Square, on the same street just a couple blocks over. He keeps walking forward, passing fifteenth, sixteenth, and eventually arriving on seventeenth street. His therapists office is on the ground floor of a building tucked between a McDonalds and a Movie theater, so it always smells faintly of grease and popcorn. 

The waiting room is made up of a few chairs, a pink loveseat with yellow stained white throw pillows, and a hideous green carpet. The actual floor is wood, and the green carpet is technically a rug, but it covers the whole floor, so it serves more as a disgusting carpet than a rug bringing a pop of color to the room. 

The receptionist sits in a small room behind a window. She’s a small, plump woman named Nancy with grey hair and cherry red cat-eye glasses. She smiles at Ian, warm and inviting like any grandma looking figure tends to be. 

“Hello darlin’,” she said in her southern drawl. Nancy moved from Georgia for college (something that came up in conversation when she inquired about Ian’s study habits and where he was attending school). She never managed to shed her accent. 

“Hey, Nancy. I have an appointment with Elaine at six-fifteen,” he told her and watched as she checked on her computer. 

“Yes you do! She’ll come grab you in a minute, just have a seat, baby.” Ian loves that, loves all of her pet names. It makes him feel welcome, like she wants him there and wants him to get better. It’s nice.

He spends a few minutes scrolling through twitter on his phone, retweeting things from his favorite celebrities and liking all the pictures Carl tosses onto his feed. It’s a few minutes of that before Elaine is stepping out into the waiting and calling him back to her office. 

He sits on the blue couch, toes perched on the floor and leg bouncing rapidly, hands cradled in his lap. Something about having to share his feelings made him want to cower in on himself. He wanted to be small, as if taking up less space meant his problems took up less space too. 

Caleb used to make fun of him for it, always laughing at the way Ian managed to make himself look so small. He found it funny that someone of Ian’s size and stature felt the need to be small, to be cradled. 

Ian never found the humor in it. 

He refocuses back on Elaine when he hears faint mumbling outside of his thoughts. 

“How are you doing, Ian?” 

He debates lying to her, knowing she’ll report back to his psychiatrist, who will want to adjust his meds if his feelings of hopelessness progress. But he also wants to feel better, he wants to go back to laughing at breakfast with Lip over whatever bullshit they got up to the night prior, and right now even just sitting up feels like a lot of effort. 

“Ian?” she presses again. 

“I don’t know.” 

“You don’t know how you're doing?” She leans forward on her chair, resting her elbows on her knees and holding her face in her manicured hands. Her hair’s pulled back and out of her face, held by barrettes with little pearls on them. 

It’s easier, sometimes, to notice things about people rather than interact with them. It’s easier to take in her french tip acrylics and her freshly dyed hair than it is to dissect his own emotions. He takes a minute to absorb his surroundings, looking for something, just one thing, he hasn’t noticed yet. The desk resting against the walls in the corner, the shelf with fidget toys he feels too embarrassed to play with. There’s the ceilings, so tall they could fit two of him stacked on top of each other. He doesn’t know why something would ever need to be that tall. He figures it’s so people have the space to expand wildly and unhinged. The ceiling is inviting them to take up as much space as they please.

It is kind of the room to give way for others to inhabit it. When Ian’s brain feels like it’s on fire, he, too, reaches the ceiling, tries to push it higher so he can take up more space.

But he doesn’t feel like that right now. 

Right now he wishes the ceiling would press him into the ground, just tight enough that it isn’t suffocating. 

Elaine waits patiently for him to respond and he wonders what it must feel like from her end when he sits statue still in silence. 

He sighs. 

“I don’t know because… I was going good, y’know? And then Lip decided we needed a roommate and then everything went to shit, I guess.” It’s not a very detailed explanation, but Elaine knows him, and she knows that sometimes that’s all he can give. 

“A new roommate? Well that’s a development: tell me more about that.” It felt like a question with the way it rose at the end. Ian knew they would waste the entire hour of their session if he didn’t answer it in a way that satisfied her. 

“He hasn’t moved in yet, but he’ll be sleeping in my room. His name’s Mickey which- stupid fucking name and he’s, y’know, Lip’s age and he has knuckle tattoos. That’s all I really know about him. That and the fact that he’s a homophobic prick.” 

“Woah! Slow down there, Ian! That’s some pretty, uh, _strong_ word choice. You’ve barely met the guy, how bad can he be?” 

“Bad,” he said petulantly, crossing his arms on top of his chest. 

Elaine frowns at his response, always disappointed when he didn’t say something ‘open-minded’ (her words. She was perpetually trying to get him to say the right thing and do exactly what he needs to do in order to get better. He figured she just doesn’t get that it’s never really so easy). 

“Ian-” 

“I know, no, I know. I should give him the benefit of the doubt but he was just… throwing around the word faggot like it doesn’t have any meaning behind it.” He was still with his arms crossed, pout extending childishly. He knows he looks like an overgrown toddler, but right now he could really go for some cubed fruit and a nap, so maybe toddlers are onto something. 

“Ian, you have friends that do the same thing. Why are you using this as a basis for judgement?” 

“Because he’s not gay! He’s throwing around all these fucking slurs and he’s not even a faggot himself. I don’t get how that’s a non-issue to everybody!” The positive side of their conversation was that it was getting Ian energized. Perhaps not in the most positive way, but his anger and agitation over the topic fed into excitement. 

Sometimes his excitement was bad, it caused the cup to overflow and made him destructive. 

“What if he’s gay, too?” Elaine asks. Ian has the urge to break out in hysterics. If he was manic he’d be leaning back, smile wide with laughter. 

“Elaine, there’s no fuckin’ way Mickey’s gay.” 

“And why not?” It’s not defensive, it’s just a question. Ian doesn’t know how she manages to sound so non-judgemental about everything. Must be a skill they teach you in therapist school.

“Because he- he just _isn’t!_ He dresses like he crawls around under peoples’ floorboards for a living. You should’ve seen him in his muscle tee and ratty old jeans. His fuckin’ muscle tank in _October_ because straight people have no regard for the weather.” 

Elaine hums to herself for a moment and stares at him quizzically. 

“You think he’s hot, don’t you?” 

Ian splutters, taken aback by her suggestion completely. 

“ _No!_ He’s the reason I’m even spiraling in the first place, I wouldn’t be spiraling because of someone I’m attracted to.”

“Yes you would,” Elaine responded matter of factly. This is what he likes about her: she’s blunt, she’s not there to tend to his wounds like a doting mother, she’s there to teach him to take care of it himself. 

Elaine is one of his favorite people. He often finds himself wishing they could be friends. 

“I’m not gonna play myself. I’m done with that shit. And, besides, it’d be too messy to get involved with my roommate. My literal _room_ mate.” 

“I never said you had to get involved with him, just that you definitely want to.” Her attitude was one of the perks of having a therapist that was young. The man Ian saw before coming to Elaine was in his fifties, whistled every time he said the letter “s” and would interrupt him to tell him how his issues related to the Cold War. 

He would not have told him, to his face, that he wanted to fuck the roommate he can’t stand. 

He sighed heavily, “Elaine, I don’t. He’s aggravating and even if he was cute, his knuckle tattoos take away all the appeal.” 

Elaine laughs, _“he has knuckle tatts?”_

Ian nods. “And they’re always bruised. Probably from beating the gay out of unsuspecting homos-” 

“Ian, I’m gonna have to actually act like your therapist for a minute and ask why you are so adamant that this probably perfectly fine young man hates gay people,” the look in her eyes softened and her features relaxed, “why are you so afraid that he might hurt you?” 

Ian froze, he didn’t know what to say. Elaine knew of his childhood and how he grew up and the harassment he faced for being gay. 

“Ian, give me one good reason as to why you can’t give this guy the benefit of the doubt?” 

He didn’t know how to respond.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'll be updating sort of randomly but no more than a week in between each update so dw i just wanna keep yall on ur toes. comments and kudos mean everything! follow me on tumblr if u want @mckeysfirstwords (i follow from my 1d acct)


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> shit happens baby! i dont wanna give too much away but ians very confused and him and mickey still hate each other

Mickey moved in on a Saturday. It was raining, which meant the boxes were falling in on themselves and making everything smell like mold and humidity. Ian and Lip had been smoking earlier, and since they couldn’t open the windows the smell had gotten trapped in their apartment. 

So it’s not that everything smelled like mold- everything smelled like _weed_ and mold. 

Ian will be honest-after you get used to it, it doesn’t actually smell that bad. It’s a bit suffocating, sure, but after about forty-five minutes of living in the odor it starts to disappear into the background and he doesn’t even notice it’s there anymore. 

Mickey, though, he notices, because the brunet seems to insist on bumping into him each time he brings a new, saggy, wet box into his apartment. 

If he bumped into him ‘on accident’ one more time Ian was going to beat him like a piñata. Wooden rod and all. 

Mickey entered Ian’s apartment holding a box with the word _BOOKS_ written across in bold sharpie. He doesn’t know where Mickey plans on putting those books, they can barely fit an ashtray into their apartment, much less an English major’s supply of novels. 

Ian can see him start to move closer to where Ian is standing, and his nostrils flare. 

“Bump into me one more time and your midget body is getting tossed out the window.” 

“Call me short one more time and Ima rip your tongue out of your head.” 

Ian could see Lip in his periphery trying to stifle a laugh, and that just made him angrier. Of course Lip would find this funny, Lip was an asshole. He doesn’t see how this is going to ruin Ian’s life. Ian doesn’t seem to get how throwing a grungy aggressive dick from the streets into his bedroom could be good for anybody. 

Lip and Mickey seem to like each other though, Lip laughing along to a story Mickey’s telling about how his sister tried to glue his dad's eyelids shut once, and she was so scared of it not working that she spent the next two weeks staying with her best friend. 

Lip immediately invited Mickey’s little sister over for dinner as a housewarming party (thankfully she said she couldn't come. Ian doesn't know if he could stand another Milkovich under his roof). Which was stupid because they already lived there and had been living there. He knows it’s supposed to be a housewarming party for Mickey, but Ian thinks that’s even more stupid because the guy absolutely sucks. 

The worst part about this whole thing is the fact that Ian can’t even sit in his bedroom to avoid all of this bullshit, because his bedroom has a parasite now. He decides it’s too much to sit at one of the stools in the kitchen, though, so he pushes past Lip and Mickey who were standing in the middle of the hallway and moves to push open the window in the living room so he could climb out onto the fire escape. 

It’s still raining, but it’s not pouring anymore, and Ian doesn’t mind getting a little damp. It beats getting a little aggravated, so he’ll take the rain. 

He lets the water gently wash over him as he closes his eyes. He was just starting to settle into the rhythm of the rain when he felt his phone buzz in his pocket. He pulled it out and saw a missed call from his best friend and a few text notifications asking if he wanted to go over to her place.

Alice lived in a nice little studio near NYU. They met when Ian was early to his therapist appointment and decided he would go to an overpriced hipster coffee shop. Alice was working there, and she tried flirting with Ian as he ordered, wrote her number on the cup and everything. Ian found it funny as he normally did when girls hit on him. It’s different being in New York where nobody knows him. Back home, none of the girls looked at him twice. 

Ian decided to text her number anyway, he liked her nose piercing and her curly hair and figured he could use more company. He only had Lip and his therapist back then (not that he has much more now) and Alice seemed plenty nice. 

Their conversation was pleasant after she got over the initial awkwardness of having flirted with a gay dude. He learned her parents immigrated to New York from São Paulo and that her name was pronounced _Ah-lee-see_ and not _A-liss_ like he read it when he first saw it. 

She was funny and wicked smart with hair the size of a rose bush and eyes like an owl, big and frightening and always noticing. Her laugh sounded like a truck horn and it always made him smile how she laughed with her whole body. 

Her and Lip got along, too, and Ian had half a brain not to set them up. He doesn’t know if he’d be able to stand it, the two smartest people he knows in the same relationship. They both studied shit with numbers- shit Ian didn’t understand in the slightest. He thinks if he had gone to college he would’ve pursued something more to do with people, maybe be a teacher. Make sure kids don’t go down the same path he did. 

His phone buzzes again with a single text reading _????_ and nothing else. He unlocks his phone and reads her previous texts. 

_Ian wanna come ooovvverrrr_

_we can binge watch hgtv ;)_

_iaaAAAAANNNNN_

_ian did u die_

_????_

He grinned, wiping his phone on his shirt to dry off the water droplets. 

_be over in a few. dickhead roommate is moving in_

_exciting ! see u soon :p_

Ian pulled himself up using the staircase in front of him. He turned around and climbed back into his apartment, telling himself the water that was dripping onto the floor would evaporate eventually. 

He walked into _his_ room to find Mickey was moving shit around in _his_ wardrobe. He doesn’t fucking know why, especially not since he had cleared space for the guy earlier that week.

“What are you doing?” He asked, crossing his arms over his chest and widening his stance. 

“The fuck’s it look like I’m doin’? I’m cleanin’ out this mess of a closet so I can put some of my own shit in here.” 

Ian rolled his eyes and shoved Mickey backwards. 

“It’s not your goddamn room, so you either take the space or leave.” 

Mickey had the nerve to smirk. 

“I know it’s not my fuckin’ room otherwise that faggy ass flag on your desk wouldn’t be here.” 

Ian saw red as he shoved Mickey back again and pinned him to the wall. 

“Careful, Mickey. If the word fag comes out of your mouth one more time people are gonna start to think you want a fag in there.” 

Mickey’s eyebrows shot up into his hairline and he pushed Ian back with a force Ian didn’t know he had in him. 

_“That a fuckin’ gay joke?”_

Ian smirked but it was soon wiped off his face as Mickey pulled him down onto his knee, effectively bruising his stomach and making him double over. He recovered quickly, and straightened up so he could aim for Mickey’s jaw. Mickey moved last minute and Ian’s fist ended up colliding with the shorter man’s temple. 

“Fuck you, Gallagher.” 

Ian decided he had nothing left to lose. 

“Gladly.” 

Mickey turned around and charged at him, but Lip pulled him back before he could get more than a step in. 

“Listen here- you two will get along, you hear me? Debbie and Carl aren’t here, I’m not gonna fucking babysit anyone.” Lip had his _I’m disciplining you voice_ on, a voice Ian normally never hears directed at him since he’s usually scolding people _with_ Lip and not being scolded _at_. 

It reminds him of Fiona, except Fi does it better. 

“Sure, Dad,” Ian said with a roll of his eyes as Mickey said “I’m gonna get a drink.” 

It made him angry how comfortable Mickey seemed in his house. He gets that it’s technically his space now, too, but he shouldn’t feel okay immediately rifling through some other guy’s closet. 

And then he had the nerve to criticize Ian’s flag, which was a tiny little thing that he got at New York pride that June. It was sitting in his pencil cup on his desk. He doesn't get how something so small and so harmless can cause someone to be so much of a douche. 

He walks out of his room before Mickey leaves to get his drink just so he can push him out of the way with his shoulder. 

“I’m going to Alice’s.” 

Lip hummed in response, “tell her I said hey.” 

Ian smiled back at his brother, “will do! I’ll probably be at her’s till late so don’t wait for me if you two plan on getting drinks to celebrate the new piece of white trash we are so charitably hosting.” His smile quickly went from genuine to condescending. 

Ian watched as Mickey’s nostrils flared and his fists clenched, but Lip had a hand pressed into his chest to keep him from moving. 

Ian grabbed his jacket and his keys, shoved his feet into a pair of sneakers and walked out the door. 

He walked to the subway station quickly, not wanting to get any more wet than he already was. 

There was a delay because of course there was, and he had no connection so he couldn’t just text Alice and tell her he’d be late, but she’s lived in New York her whole life, he’s sure she’ll get it.

It’s a good half hour later and he’s exiting on eighth street and NYU, pulling his coat above his head to shield himself from the rain that’s started to come down harder. 

He’s at her building in five minutes and at her door in six, panting from running up the six flights of stairs. He should be used to it seeing as his apartment complex doesn’t have an elevator, but he has a feeling no one can really get used to running up the stairs, no matter how in shape they are. 

He pushes the door open into her apartment, greeted immediately by the sounds of whatever indie band she was into at the moment and the smell of banana bread in the oven. 

He spotted her head of curly hair dancing in the kitchen as she washed the dishes, her back to him. He made his presence known by singing along (very poorly) to the parts of the songs he knew. She turned around instantly, her smile brilliant. 

“Ian!” she said as she wrapped her arms around his neck, careful not to let her soapy hands get into his hair. She pulled away and planted a kiss on his cheek, smiling at him and turning around to continue working on the pile of dirty cooking utensils. 

The kiss on the cheek threw Ian off at first, especially back when he still thought she was trying to flirt with him. After she explained it was just part of her culture, a part she just tries to squeeze into her everyday life, he realized it really meant nothing. 

Alice’s favorite thing is where she comes from. She moved to America when she was four with her parents and four siblings. She doesn’t remember much of it, and she’s never gone back (not for lack of want, she’s just too scared she won’t be let back into the country) so whatever part she can implement into the day to day she tries to. 

“I thought you had ditched me!” 

“Nah, the trains were all just fucked as usual,” he replied, gesturing wildly at nothing as if that conveyed his point any easier. 

“Oh, a New York classic.” She wiped her hand on the dish rag hanging off the oven handle, moving across the kitchen to the living room to light a candle. It was linen scented. 

“God, aren’t you just so ready for the rain to turn to snow? I love when the city is covered in white.” 

“Every city in America is covered in white.” 

Alice snorted, “okay, yeah, fuck you, you know what I mean. Winter is the best season. It’s cold so you can bundle up in sweaters and those big fun coats and there’s hot chocolate and christmas _and_ we get a month off school- well. I do.” 

“Ha ha very funny rub in the fact that I’m an idiot some more,” he said bitterly, but he didn’t care, not really. He accepted that he wasn’t destined to be some nobel prize winner, and he was content with that. He was happy with his life, it was going a hell of a lot better than he ever expected it to. He has an apartment with his brother, his family is safe and content, and he has the greatest friend he could ask for. 

So, yeah, it was all good on his side. 

Alice shoved him playfully. “Shut up, you’re so smart. I don’t get why you never went to college. You got a twenty-eight on your ACT studying at a school where no one gave a shit about you, you could’ve easily gotten into a pretty decent school.” 

“I got a twenty-eight out of luck, you know my record. They’d never let me in.” They’re both silent for a minute before Ian speaks up again, “and, besides, I like what I’ve got goin’ for me. I’d still be in fucking… _Chicago_ if I was in college and then _we_ ,” he gestures between the two of them, “never would have met.” 

“And oh what a tragedy that would be, because you’re such a delight to have around.” 

Alice laughs and checks her phone, smiling down at it like an idiot, and that’s how Ian knows it’s Mandy. 

Ian’s met Mandy twice in his life. 

The first time was at Alice’s birthday party, and all Ian remembers from that is that she can hold her alcohol better than any of the guys there and that he kept staring at her nose ring, mesmerized. 

The second time was when they accidentally ran into each other while getting coffee. It was at the place Alice works at, Panaderia (which, after googling it, Ian discovered meant _bakery_ ). It took him a minute to place her when he first saw her, one of those people that look familiar and you can’t figure out why. 

It took Mandy staring back with a matching confused expression for it to click. 

_“Mandy?”_

_“Ian, right?”_

_“Yeah! Hey, listen, wanna sit together? Un-unless you’re going somewhere?”_

_“Nah, I got some spare time,” she had responded with a smile._

They spent nearly an hour there, sharing stories about Alice back and forth. Alice and Mandy met the same way her and Ian did- Alice putting her number on a coffee cup with a winky face and a ‘call me’. 

Ian likes her, thinks they could be good friends. She’s funny and quick-witted and she has a dry raspy laugh that makes you think she doesn’t actually find anything funny. Ian is fascinated by her and her eyebrows and her permanent scowl. He gets why Alice is so head over heels for her. 

He looks at Alice who is sitting on the floor in front of the couch across from him. He snaps his fingers and clears his throat, anything to get her attention, but none of that works. Not even calling her name. So he does what he normally does when he can’t get her attention. 

“I met someone today. He’s got blue eyes and black hair and he’s a bit shorter than I like them to be but it’s not too bad.” That gets her attention fast, always ready to hear about Ian’s boy stories. 

She thinks he’s lonely, and she’s constantly trying to set him up with guys she thinks are a good match. They never are, and Ian always leaves them disappointed when he tells them he was just looking for a good time and nothing else. 

“Who?” Her eyes are glowing with anticipation, wide and round behind her thin framed glasses. She looks like a child.

“My annoying fucking roommate, that’s who. Guy’s a fuckin’ prick. Homophobic, too.” 

Alice visibly deflates, and Ian only feels a little bit bad when her lips stick out in a pout and her shoulders hunch in. 

“You’re no fun,” she says petulantly. 

“ _He’s_ no fun. Taking over my room and acting like it’s _his_ room. It’s not! It’s mine! He’s just sleeping in it. Did you know he was moving my stuff around to make room for his shit?” Ian got up and went to the fridge to get him and Alice some beer. He went ahead and grabbed the entire six pack, figuring they’d be drinking for a while. It’s not like he had anything better to do. 

“Thanks,” she says as she grabs the beer he’s handing to her. 

They’re silent for a minute, drinking in peace. They go through almost the whole six pack before either of them brings back conversation, both content to be drinking in the company of the other. 

Ian’s pleasantly tipsy, the medication making him a lightweight. He used to be able to drink his weight in alcohol, but with all the medications he’s on it only takes him a couple of beers before he’s slurring his words together. 

“Maybe your roommate won’t be so bad after you get to know him,” Alice says as she stares up at the ceiling. Ian may be tipsy, but no amount of alcohol could get him to bear this conversation. 

“Fuck you.” 

Alice laughs. “I’m serious!” she says as she hits his leg, leaning across her living room floor to reach him. “He can’t be _that_ bad, Gallagher.” 

“Yes, yes he can. The guy looked at the _very_ small flag I have on my desk and called it, and I quote, a _faggy ass flag_. How is that not that bad? That’s terrible. I never want to see him again.” He crossed his arms over his chest and pouted dramatically, the action earning a fit of giggles from the brown haired girl beside him. 

“Ok, so maybe he’s a douche. Is he at least attractive?” She was staring at him over the rim of her beer bottle, wiggling her eyebrows in a jokingly seductive manner. It made Ian snort. 

“Why does everyone bring that up?!”

Alice squealed. “So he _is_ hot!” 

“No, he’s not, fuck off,” but there was no heat behind it, the alcohol making him too giggly. And, if he was being honest, Mickey wasn’t the worst thing to look at it. If he wasn’t plagued with that hideous attitude and terrible sense of style, he would honestly be vaguely attractive. 

Vaguely. 

“He, like, doesn’t look human.” Ian scrunches his face up as he thinks about it, disgust mixed with confusion and irritation clouding his features. 

Laughter bubbles out of Alice, the weed she’d procured a little while ago reaching her system and making her loopier than just the beer would’ve. 

“I’m serious. He looks like a weird alien with big blue eyes and ugly tattoos. He looks deformed.” 

Alice doesn’t stop laughing, her hair falling into her eyes. She looks up at Ian, her smile lining up with his drunk anger. And he smiles back, and it’s genuine, and it’s the first genuine smile since this whole Mickey mess began. He’s infinitely grateful for her as he usually is. 

The night goes by smoothly. They talk in circles about all the things that don’t matter and never accidentally get too close to any real topics. They’re hanging on cliffs over the ocean, the water is right there but it can’t reach them. 

Ian will run from it if he has to. 

It’s around midnight when he realizes he should make some move to head home. It’s not terribly late, but he wants to make sure all of his shit hasn’t been reorganized by Mikhailo. He gives Alice a hug goodbye, saying he’ll talk to her tomorrow and makes his way home. 

The apartment is full of laughter when Ian walks in from where Mickey and Lip are talking on their living room floor. They’ve clearly been smoking and while a part of Ian wants to sit there and smoke with his brother, even though Mickey would be right there, the other part just wants to crash. Tired of being tired and ready to get a restless night of sleep. He stands in the doorway as he watches them laugh, and, for just a second, Mickey looks like a human being. 

He doesn’t say anything to either of them, but he nods his head at Lip, who waves back. Mickey doesn’t acknowledge he exists, which is fair, but in his tired state hurts just a bit. 

His room is quiet, and messier than it was that morning, traces of Mickey left everywhere like soil from a potted plant when you accidentally knock it onto the carpet.

He picks up what he can, throwing it onto Mickey’s side of the room, and crawls into bed. He tried to trace the patterns on the ceiling, but they seem to move too much in the dark for him to categorize them. Some look like eyes, staring at him, blinking slowly. Some like people’s faces, laughing and mocking and making a fool out of him and some of them- 

Some of them he refuses to look at long enough to figure out what they could be. 

He falls asleep slowly, and then slower, and he doesn’t seem to ever reach the point of sleep where you get _rest._ He wakes up officially at around 4:30 in the morning. And he waits for the day to begin and the light to come through the window. 

But it’s cloudy, and it starts to pour within an hour, so Ian turns to face the wall and ignores the other body in his room with him. 

Ignores everything, and falls asleep. 

When he wakes up again it’s around nine. His room is empty, save for him sitting up in his bed staring at the area Mickey should’ve been occupying. It looks more organized than it did last night. He silently hopes he didn’t wake Mickey up with his jostling. He knows how important sleep is, and even though Mickey is an asshole, he can only imagine how much worse he’d be if he was an insomniac.

He grabs the first pair of jeans and a hoodie that he can find. It’s still dark and wet out, but he’s too lazy to carry an umbrella, and it’s not like his work is too far away from his apartment. 

He skips breakfast, not so hungry. He never is when he gets like this it’s like his stomach shrinks to compensate for the magnitude of his emotions. His brain seems to be the biggest part of him, and somehow he still feels so small. Lip’s got his laptop up, working on something that Ian probably won’t understand, and so he doesn’t ask any questions. Just grabs a cup of water and takes his medication which was sitting on the counter daring him to forget it. 

Lip throws him a sad smile, and Ian wishes it didn’t feel so much like pity. He hates pity, he hates feeling like people don’t trust him. 

And he gets why they don’t. He knows why Lip and Fiona check up on him in rotation when he’s in any sort of mood and he understands the fear when he tells Lip he’s starting to write a novel or he’s gonna try to beat the world record of most records broken. He gets it, in theory, but in practice it feels so… demeaning. He’s an adult for fuck’s sake. He should be able to handle himself.

But he isn't. He doesn’t know quite yet how to get himself out of the holes he digs. And it’s comfortable sometimes to stay in those holes. He builds himself a home, there, his little nook in the corner, a place to sleep. 

And it’s nice. It’s what he knows. 

He gives Lip a sad wave, and leaves for work. 

Work is slow. Nothing really happens but it doesn’t matter much because Ian gets paid by the hour anyway. His interaction with his customers are slow. And he can tell they’re annoyed with him, but he doesn’t care, he’s too tired to do that. 

He’s about to take his lunch break when someone walks in. He groans, but when he looks up it’s one of the men he used to mess around with. One of the better ones, he always paid him more than most. Ian doesn’t know what he’s doing here, but at the same time he totally does. 

He wouldn’t really mind going home with him for a night. It would mean more money and more time away from his apartment. 

Lloyd looked him up and down with the same smirk he always had. Ian was too tired to play games with him right now. If he wanted something he was gonna have to be upfront about it. 

“Hey, Lloyd. Need any help finding what you’re looking for?” His tone was monotonous but there was as much of a smile on his face as he could manage. He wanted Lloyd to take him home, have his way with him, and get whatever money Lloyd was willing to give him. 

“I think you know exactly what I’m looking for,” he replied with a coy smile. Ian smiled back, and held back the roll of his eyes 

He was going to get what he wanted, they both were. 

“Oh yeah?” Ian flirted back. He knew how to press Lloyd’s buttons by now. He knew how to get what he wanted from most of the men he encountered, but Lloyd was a different story. They met back when Ian still lived in Chicago. Llyod was coming for a business trip and ran into Ian who was going into the city because Carl needed to collect cash from somebody. 

Ian was standing outside a tall building while Carl went in, when Lloyd approached him. He probably thought Ian was a hooker, but he never admitted to such, so Ian let it slide. 

Carl told him he could go home by himself, so Ian left with the older man and spent the night in his hotel room. They exchanged numbers, and Lloyd never contacted him again. 

Until he got to New York and started working as a bartender, Lloyd came in with his wife, acted like he didn’t recognize Ian, but shot him a text when he went to the bathroom. 

They’ve met up a few times since, and it always ends with Ian pawning off whatever nice gift he usually receives. 

“Listen,” he said, as he trailed a manicured finger across the grimy countertop, inching his hand closer to where Ian’s were resting, “how about I pick you up once your shift is over and we head back to my place. My wife’s out of town… I can open up a bottle of wine for us… what do you say, hmm?” 

“Well how can I say no to that?” 

“When does your shift end?” 

Ian tells him it ends at five, Lloyd buys himself a candy bar, and winks at Ian on his way out. 

The rest of the afternoon goes by slowly, but it isn’t terrible. Ian isn’t sure he’d be able to handle anything else right now. The gentle pace of the afternoon is pleasant. He waits for the girl that’s supposed to do the closing shift to show up before he leaves. 

She shows up fifteen minutes later than she was supposed to, with a mumbled _sorry_ and an apologetic smile so Ian just smiles back and lets her take care of things. 

He shows up at Lloyd’s apartment in Manhattan a couple minutes before the clock strikes six. A part of him just wants to turn around and leave him hanging. It wouldn’t be the first time he’s ghosted someone.

But no. He’d rather deal with Lloyd at this very moment than go back to his apartment and have to deal with the laughing coming from his brother and Mickey. He doesn’t think he can stomach it. 

He raises his hand to knock at the door and his body has never felt heavier. He’s made of bricks and tar in that moment, it’s a struggle not to simply collapse in the hallway of this incredibly swanky apartment complex. Sink right into the carpet and mold into the tacky pattern. 

But he knocks. And he plasters a smile on his face that he knows doesn’t reach his eyes. He hopes Lloyd doesn’t notice (he also hopes he does and lets Ian go home). 

He doesn’t notice, and greets Ian with a kiss on the cheek, a _hello there_ a little slurred, like he’d been drinking. His shirt is unbuttoned far more than what would be socially acceptable, but Ian likes it. His chest hairs are grey and there are smiles lines around his eyes. It comforts Ian, a bit, that he could never relate to him. That all of this is on a strictly physical level. He appreciates it, sometimes. It’s not always so bad to feel like all you are is a body, especially when he wants to forget his mind so often. 

They drink, him and Lloyd, but they don’t spend too long talking, as Lloyd starts to kiss his neck after a few glasses of wine. Ian acts like he likes this part, for Lloyd’s sake, but he just wishes they would cut to the goddamn chase. 

It’s not long before they do. They do it in his living room, blinds open, for all of New York to see. Someone could take a photograph of them for all he cared and he wouldn’t even notice. Too busy trying to forget everything and get his emotions out in that moment. 

It doesn’t work. 

Not for him, at least. Lloyd seems to enjoy it just fine but Ian can’t bring himself to finish. 

He leaves the man in a drunken state laying on his rug. 

He goes to his bedroom, saying he’s going to use the bathroom, and grabs some of the jewelry in the drawers. He probably won’t notice, and if he does he can just buy a new one. Ian isn’t worried. 

“Ian,” he says when Ian walks out of his room, “don’t hesitate to call if you ever want anything. And don’t worry, you can take more than that, she’s a bitch regardless.” 

Ian smiles, thanks him, but doesn’t go back to grab anything else, unsure of how he feels about the way Lloyd read him back in there. 

He walks until his legs get tired. In circles probably because he’s unfamiliar with this area of the city. Everything’s too expensive for him to exist next to, so he doesn’t really frequent it. There are parts of New York that he doesn’t even recognize as the same city he lives in. Lloyd’s apartment is nothing like his shoebox that he has to share with two other people. His chest can expand and his lungs can take in air without feeling like they’re invading the personal space of somebody else. 

The air is damp. Not humid but there’s a wet quality to it from the rainy morning. It matches Ian’s mood which somehow makes him feel worse. He doesn’t want everyone else to be gloomy indoors instead of out walking their dogs and shopping. New York isn’t New York when it’s quiet, in the same way that his head isn’t his head when it’s too loud. 

His legs get tired eventually, after an hour of walking around, gazing into shops and getting his hand print on the windows. He almost adopts a cat, but then remembers his apartment doesn’t allow for that, and Lip’s allergic, and Mickey would probably skin it for fun. 

God he can’t believe he has to live with him for… fuck who _knows_ how long. It makes him angry, which is almost nice, a distraction from the overwhelming sadness he’s been feeling lately. 

He hates his brain. He will complain about this to the end of time he just wishes on every shooting star and every birthday candle that someone else on this planet had to deal with it instead. And he knows it’s not nice, especially when he knows how _bad_ it gets. 

But damn, he wouldn’t mind having it not be him. 

Days where he can wake up and shower and eat breakfast without feeling like the world was going to crush him under the weight of the sky. 

He doesn’t remember getting on the subway. He doesn’t remember walking to his building. He doesn’t remember climbing up the stairs, but eventually he’s staring at his door the same way he was staring at Lloyd’s door a few hours earlier. He still feels like sinking into the floor, but this time he feels like he can go inside and sink into the frame of his bed instead. 

When he walks in Mickey is standing in front of the fridge, a fresh beer in his hand. He looks sad, and Ian has half a mind to give a shit about it. 

He wants to grab something to eat from the fridge, not noticing his hunger until that very moment. He’s pretty sure he has some orange chicken leftover from a few days ago, and he wouldn’t mind having a bite of that. 

Mickey’s still standing in front of the fridge, though. 

“Move.” 

“Use your words.” Ian knows it’s meant to be mocking, but his words are so slurred and his tone so desperate and… lonely, that it comes out closer to pathetic. 

“Sorry, mom,” Ian fires back. 

Mickey breathes heavily next to him, and turns so his whole body is fully facing Ian. 

“Why- why do you hate me so much, huh? What the fuck did I ever do to you?” If Ian didn’t know better, he would say Mickey was near tears. Which- funny. 

Ian rolled his eyes. 

“You’re homophobic, you make fun of my shit, you’re dirty, and you smell like a fucking ashtray. Riddle me this, _Milkovich_. What is there to like about you? Huh?” Mickey opens his mouth to speak, to defend himself, but Ian isn’t ready to hear anything. Refuses to. “What are you gonna do? What are you gonna say? Gonna call me a fag? Gonna call me some derogatory slur to make yourself feel better because you’re nothing but a little bitch.” 

Ian didn’t notice how close he had gotten, but when he stopped to take in his surroundings, he was barely two inches away from Mickey’s face, with a finger pressed into his chest. 

Mickey stares back at him and doesn’t say anything. Ian can smell his breath. It smells like cheap beer and orange chicken- the bastard. He doesn’t say anything, and Ian smiles, almost victorious. 

“I fucking knew it. You’re nothing but a-” 

And then Mickey’s kissing him. Ian’s face is in his hands, and Mickey’s lips are on his. For a split second he almost considers leaning in to it. But then he realizes Mickey’s probably just joking, that this is just something funny to him- kiss his gay roommate and then make fun of him for leaning in, for wanting it to mean something. 

Not that Ian wanted it to mean something. Not with Mickey, at least. 

He pushes him away. 

“Fuck you.” 

He ignores how sad Mickey looks. He ignores the despair in his eyes. He ignores the way he swipes a hand across his cheek. Almost as if he was crying about something. 

He ignores all of it, goes to his room, and locks the door. Mickey can sleep on the couch. 

+++

Ian tries to say something the next day. He almost out right asks him why he kissed him, but before he can even approach him, he finds Mickey scrolling through twitter. 

“Jesus Christ, why do people feel the need to flaunt their sexuality. Nobody gives a shit.” 

“Bold of you to say.” 

“The fuck is that ‘sposed to mean?” Mickey’s glare is challenging, and it makes part of Ian think he knows exactly what he means, but he also looks generally angry at the accusation, so Ian backs down. He was drunk, afterall. 

“Never mind,” he says, and walks back to their room and climbs out onto the fire escape. He doesn’t remember if he was supposed to go to work, but he doesn’t have the energy to check, and even less energy to actually go.

The day is nice, the sun is shining on his face, and even though it’s cold the weather is still pleasant. He tries to breathe in as deeply as he can, tries to force himself bigger but there's a band around him that's pressing him down and forcing him smaller. He feels his eyes fill up with tears, he thinks about the night before and how, even though Mickey’s a dick, he wanted him to mean it. 

He just wants someone to mean something. 

But how pathetic is that? To be so lonely within yourself that you need somebody else to make you feel like a human being again. 

And how badly he wanted to feel like a human again. 

He watched the people below him as they went about their day. Wondered how the lady with the fake blonde is doing, whether or not she’s still in love with her husband. Maybe she’s having an affair with a man many years younger than her. A story Ian is all too familiar with. 

He looks at the two girls holding hands. Watches them let go when a mother pushing her kids on a stroller gives them a nasty look. Ian sends them as much love as he can get himself to feel in that moment. They don’t deserve it. 

He wonders what people think of him when he walks around. 

He wonders if they can see that he’s fucking mental. He wonders how sad he looks to other people. If they notice how his shoulders cave in and how slow his steps are, like he’s stuck in a coffin and has to carry that extra weight around all the time. 

He’s crying. He doesn’t realize it but between the people watching and the self analyzing, tears starting streaming down his cheeks. They’re warm against his cold face and salty as they trail down onto his lips. He holds himself and lets his bones weigh him down as he presses further into the brick wall of the building behind him. 

He can hear the door to his bedroom open, faintly. It’s more of a whisper but he recognizes the creaking of the hinges. He hates the thought that he’ll have to walk back in there and face Mickey. He hates it with his whole being. Maybe he could just stay here, where the sky touches all the buildings individually and with gentle ease. Maybe he could stay right there where no one could reach him, because he blended in with the brick background so well that no one could even find him. 

Lip would find him, eventually. The sun was starting to set and Ian hadn’t even noticed the passing of time. He must’ve fallen asleep, that or he had zoned out hardcore. Neither are unlikely. 

Lip did find him. Knocking on the window, holding a plate of food. Ian smiled at him, the first genuine smile he had given anyone in days. Lip climbed up to sit next to Ian, and for a minute they sat in silence, just admiring the way the city lit up. Slowly. The lights trickling in from each apartment at its own tempo. You can’t see the stars most nights, not with the light pollution, but he doesn’t care. There’s something comforting about the idea that every light represents a person. That the thousands of specks of electrical stars are thousands of people with loves and families. People who are trying their best to make something out of their life. 

“It’s nice isn’t it?” Lip asks. 

Ian nods, but doesn’t say anything. 

“Anyways. I, uhm, brought you food. Well really, Mickey went out and brought home a pizza. Didn’t tell him I was sneaking you a piece, but I’m pretty sure he got the idea since I went into your fuckin’ room.” Lip lets out a light chuckle. He wants this to work out so badly that Ian almost apologizes to Mickey for an action he didn’t even take, just to put his brother at ease. “So yeah here’s some food, I brought your meds too, and a water bottle.” 

Ian nodded again. 

Lip inhaled, and it seemed like he was getting ready to leave Ian alone again, but before he did anything he let out a sigh and turned to Ian so his whole body was facing him. 

“You can talk to me, man. You should know that. We’re the only family we got, don’t be afraid to reach out dickhead.” Lip planted a kiss on his forehead, in that way only an older brother can. 

“Yeah, I just- I need a little time to myself right now that’s all.” 

“Okay.” Lip smiles at him, a crooked smile that doesn’t really look like a smile at all. It’s pained, and Ian curses his mother for ever giving him this disorder. 

He eats his pizza. It’s kind of cold, but it’s good. Much better than what they had back in Chicago. It’s the only thing he’s really eaten all day, and his stomach doesn’t agree with it, but he’s hungry, so he tries to force it down anyways.

When he climbs back into his room, Mickey is already in there, reading some heavy looking book with a title in a language he couldn’t quite make out. 

Ian crawls into his bed and presses his face into his pillow. Maybe if he stays in that position long enough he’ll stop being able to breathe. Not that he wants to die, he just wants to sleep for a long time, and wake up again when things are better, 

But things won’t get better unless he does something about it. 

And he’s too tired to do anything right now. 

So he falls asleep. 

He wakes up around three in the morning and goes into the kitchen to get a glass of water, his mouth dry. Mickey’s there again, nursing a bottle of wine this time. His cheeks are rosy from the alcohol and he looks almost sweet. His eyes are red rimmed, and if Ian didn’t know any better he’d assume Mickey was high, but he looks more like he’s been crying instead of smoking. 

Ian really wants to ask. He wants to know what’s turning this guy into an alcoholic. Maybe he’s already an alcoholic, him and Lip are just unaware because he only drinks in the middle of the night. 

But for some reason that doesn’t sit well with him. There’s something else. 

And, fuck, Ian doesn’t know why he cares. He doesn’t. He’s just curious. He doesn’t care if Mickey wants to throw his life away for alcohol. The guy’s a dick, why would he care? 

But he does, at least a small part of him does, because he finds himself throwing Mickey a weak smile, because right now that’s all he can muster. Mickey scowls at him, and it just proves Ian’s point that the guy’s a dick and shouldn’t be interacted with. 

Ian grabs a water bottle from the fridge, and makes a mental note to buy some more next time he leaves the house. 

He doesn’t know when that will be, but it’s the thought that counts. 

It’s as he’s walking back to his room that Mickey speaks up. 

“Wait-” he says. So Ian does. He stands there, leaning against the wall, eyes half closed, waiting for Mickey to say something. But he doesn’t. He stands there contemplating it, Ian can tell, but he doesn’t say anything, so Ian starts walking back towards his room. 

“Just… wait. Please.” 

Ian doesn’t turn back around. 

The next morning when Ian wakes up Mickey’s already gone. Again. He doesn’t know why his classes are so early in the morning, Lip’s were never before nine, but it’s seven-thirty and Mickey is nowhere to be found. 

Not that Ian cares, but he’s confused. 

First he kisses him, which was as a joke and definitely not funny but then whatever happened yesterday doesn’t make sense to Ian. Mickey was crying, that much he knows, but for some reason it almost seemed like he wanted to talk to Ian, wanted to tell him something he would never say sober. 

He was okay with never finding out. 

The following days go by as he would expect. Lip is still a douchebag but he makes sure to bring Ian his meds without being overbearing, along with a plate of whatever he and Mickey had for dinner.

It’s weird. Lip and Mickey seem to get along just fine. Ian doesn’t know why Mickey can’t be civil around him. The only times he seems to consider Ian as a human being is when it’s in the middle of the night and he’s completely inebriated. 

Ian made the executive decision when he woke up that morning that he would leave the house. He hadn’t been showing up to work recently, but his boss was fine with it, understanding that sometimes these things were out of his control. 

He was planning on going to Alice’s, but she sent him a text last minute saying she was busy with school work and had to study for an exam for one of her classes. Ian didn’t know who else to call, but he knew he wanted to get out of the house. 

He was standing by the door, just staring at it, when Lip showed up beside him and put a hand on his shoulder. 

“So we gonna go somewhere or what?” 

Ian smiled at him and nodded. Lip shouted a goodbye to Mickey, which made Ian roll his eyes. Not because of his issues with Mickey but because there’s no need to shout in an apartment so small. 

They’re a few blocks away from their building when Lip finally starts up conversation. 

“How are you, man?” 

Ian sighs, he knows he won’t get out of this question and he knows how much Lip has worried. He’s overheard enough of his calls to Fiona at night talking about how he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do. Ian wishes he would just talk to him, instead. 

Except when Lip does try to talk to him, he hates it. He wants to shut down and walk back to their apartment without another word. 

But he won’t, and he doesn’t. He closes his eyes and presses pause on everything for a second before turning to Lip. 

“I don’t know, if I’m being totally honest. It just… it’s fucking unfair. I didn’t ask for this you know but Mom had to go and fuck me over.” 

“At least you didn’t also get Frank’s alcoholism.” 

“Yeah at least.” 

There’s silence again, but it’s comfortable, and Ian almost misses the days they would spend in their room together back in Chicago, both awake staying up later than they should, not saying anything. They would just sit in the quiet. 

“How do you feel about Mickey?” Ian opens his mouth to respond but Lip cuts him off before he can even say anything. “I mean, fuckin’, I know how you feel about Mickey, but is it so bad? Do you want me to tell him to find another place to live?” 

“No man, I’m not kicking him out just because I think he’s a dick, he doesn’t deserve to be homeless-” 

“He wouldn’t be homeless, I’m sure he can just, uh, go back to wherever the fuck he came from.” Ian doesn’t respond. “Ian, I’m serious. The guy clearly bothers you if you want I can tell him he’s gotta find somewhere else to stay.” 

“But you two seem to get along fine, so why would you do that?” 

“For you, dickhead.” 

Silence grows for a beat, but is ultimately interrupted by Lip speaking up again. 

“I think you’d like him.” Ian snorts, which makes Lip chuckle which causes Ian to break out into genuine laughter. He feels light headed. “I’m serious. He’s funny and he’s kind of a dick, all the makings of everyone you’ve ever stuck your dick into.” 

“Fuck off.” 

“Suit yourself.” 

Lip pulls out a cigarette and offers one to Ian who accepts and waits for Lip to hand him the lighter. He hasn’t had time like this with his brother in a while. Just the two of them smoking something without really saying much at all. 

Fiona should be here, he thinks. She would’ve had something to say. She would’ve known what to do, how to help. Ian has half a mind now to reach out to her, but he knows if he does she’ll get paranoid; she’d probably end up finding a way to get to New York just to make sure Ian was doing okay. 

He should call her. He should call all of them. Maybe do a group family call, not that they’ve ever done that before, but just because it would be nice to have them all talking to each other at the same time. He wonders how big Liam’s gotten, he hasn’t seen him in so long, and kids grow fast. 

“We should call them,” he announces to Lip, who was on his phone texting Tami. “We should call them,” he says again, nudging Lip so he’ll listen. 

“Call who?” 

“Fiona and them. We haven’t talked in a long time- I mean you have, I know you and Fi talk about me behind my back- but what about Debbie? And Carl? And Liam? How are they doing? Don’t you wonder?” 

Lip looks guilty, and Ian immediately regrets saying anything, because he knows he doesn’t wanna hear what Lip’s about to say. 

“I’m, uh, going there this weekend.” 

“You’re what?” 

“The company needs me to do some business in Chicago, and I was gonna stop by. See them or whatever.” 

“And you weren’t planning on telling me?” 

“I was trying to delay letting you know you’d be spending the weekend with Mickey. I figured keeping it from you would be best for your own sake.” 

Lip should thank the high heavens that Ian isn’t in a manic state, because if he had any energy he would be chewing his ear out, maybe even throwing him to the ground right in the middle of the street.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” He means for it to sound more aggressive, but it comes out sounding more like he’s been defeated. He’s got nothing left in him anymore. 

Suddenly being locked up in his room seems more appealing.

He turns around without saying anything, and starts the walk back to their apartment.

“Oh come the fuck on, Ian. Are you serious?” 

Ian doesn’t respond, he just keeps walking. 

He doesn’t quite know why he’s so upset. He could take Lip’s room for the weekend, not have to worry about looking Mickey in the eye, but there’s something else, something heavier. 

He misses them. His family. He misses hearing Debbie complain about a boy (or, now, girls, he figures), and Carl talking about the last violent act he’s committed. He misses Fiona, no matter how overbearing she can be sometimes. 

Fuck Lip for not telling him. Fuck him for leaving Ian alone when he gets to go back and see all their siblings. 

It was making Ian irrationally angry, he knows that, but he can’t help but enjoy the change in emotion. 

His heart starts beating faster, it starts to run wild like it’s a horse and it knows it’s got money bet on it. He doesn’t notice it, but his legs start moving faster, and his breath starts getting shallow, and soon enough he’s running. He’s running down the streets of New York unhinged like an animal. He hasn’t felt so alive in so long, he thinks he could touch the stars lowest on the horizon if only they weren’t too shy to peek out from behind the clouds. He’s pushing past the people on the street, his jacket flying behind him in the wind. The air bites at his cheeks and his nose and his lips. 

And he _feels_ it. 

He almost stops running right then just to appreciate the feeling of cold on his face. 

But he doesn’t, he lets his legs carry him as far as they can without collapsing underneath him. He forgets about Lip, he didn’t even turn around to see the expression on his face when he walked away. He’s probably gonna end up going to Tami’s anyway, it’s not like he really cares about what Ian does anymore. So long as it’s not as bad as his first manic episode, it doesn’t matter to him. 

Ian runs until the sun hangs low in the sky. He’s tempted to collapse on the sidewalk, but it’s New York, and he doesn’t know how well that would go over. 

Really, most people probably wouldn’t notice. 

He stands there, for a minute, admiring the way the sun keeps a grip on the horizon, refusing to sink lower. It’s greedy, he thinks, refuses to share it’s space with anything else. The moon’s already out, glowing despite the sun’s presence. 

He remembers when Debbie went through a phase where she was obsessed with astrology and the moon and whatever the fuck else goes along with that kind of shit. She was friends with these new girls and wanted to impress them. 

Looking back, she totally had a crush on one of them, but that’s not of importance anymore. 

He remembers her fascination with the moon and what it meant. She loved what it represented. Ian still doesn’t get it, but it’s funny, now. He doesn’t think Debbie much cares anymore. Things that happen as you get older, he figures. All the things you once loved don’t mean as much as they once did. 

He finds the nearest place to sit, it ends up being the steps of a drug store that was mostly empty. 

He takes his phone out and dials Fiona’s number. She answers after a couple rings. 

“Hey, Ian!” She sounds happy, and it makes tears start to well up in Ian’s eyes. Fiona deserves to be happy, more than anyone he’s ever known. Maybe things are going okay for them, he knows Fiona’s got a new job that pays more than minimum wage, he doesn’t know exactly what it is, but if it’s making shit easier for them then he’s grateful. 

“Hi-Hi, Fi.” 

“You good?” And immediately her voice turns serious, the maternal instinct clear. 

“Yeah, I’m good. I just miss you guys, that’s all. How is everyone?” He can hear her sigh on the other end of the line, and normally he would hate that she worries about him so much, but right in that moment he was just glad to let her know she didn’t need to worry about him, alleviate some stress. 

“They’re good, yeah, everyone’s doing great. We miss you! And Lip, but I think secretly some of us miss you the most. Debbie especially. She keeps saying she needs to call you, but I don’t think she ever does.” 

Ian can hear the smile in her voice. He smiles back. 

“She called me a while ago. Hasn’t called me since, though. Tell her I can always make time if she needs to say anything.”

“Will do.”

Neither of them speak for a while, but it’s not awkward, it’s not tense. The silence holds an unspoken conversation, a declaration of love and warmth. 

Fiona clears her throat, and suddenly the mood shifts. 

“How are you, Ian? Are you holdin’ up ok? you know, if the city ever becomes too much there’s always room for you here.” And he couldn’t even be mad at her, because he knows a part of her just wants him back. He doesn’t know how Fi will cope when Debbie and Carl leave and it’s just her and Liam. Maybe by then everything will be settled. 

“I’m good, Fiona. I’m doing all the things I have to do. I’m taking my meds and I haven’t skipped therapy. I’ve left the house this past week. I’m doing okay. I just get like this sometimes, that’s all.” 

“I know.” A beat. “I know.” 

“I just wish everybody would stop treating me like I’m falling apart.” 

Fiona must’ve picked up on the fact that Ian didn’t want to talk about it any more. He was caving in on himself, and Fiona’s known him as long as he’s been alive, he knows she can tell. 

“Well, enough of that. Lip’s told me you hate your new roommate hmm? What’s that about?” 

He groans. “God, Fi, the guy’s a complete dick. He’s always sayin’ shit about my sexuality like… fuck him, you know? And then he tries to kiss me in the middle night like-” 

“Hold on- he tried to kiss you?” 

“He didn’t try to, he… he did. Kiss me. He was drunk and probably only did it to make fun of me because he’s a _complete dick_ , as I’ve _mentioned,_ and he was probably only going to make fun of me and I don’t need that.”

Fiona’s silent for a second. 

“Have you considered maybe he’s just scared?” 

And, no, he hadn’t. But he figured there’s no way. Mickey was a dick, not some scared little gay kid who didn’t know any better. The guy was twenty-something (Ian didn’t know, it’s not like they ever talked about, well, anything, really). 

And that was the issue wasn’t it? He didn’t know Mickey at all. He slept in the same room as the guy but he didn’t know a thing about him. For some reason, now he’s considering actually talking to him. Maybe it’s the fact that Elaine said the same thing, told him to give Mickey the benefit of the doubt. Maybe hearing it twice is finally gonna make him treat Mickey like a human being. 

Un-fucking-likely. Unless the guy decides to stop being a dick first. 

“Even if he is, which I don’t think so, I think he’s just an angry homophobic piece of shit-” 

“A homophobic piece of shit that kissed you.” He could see her face so clearly it’s like she was standing right in front of him, eyebrows raised in a defying manner with her arm on her hip, like she knew better than everybody. 

“To _mock me!_ There’s no other reasonable explanation.” 

“The fact that he likes guys but he’s scared and he’s attracted to you but doesn’t know how to admit it because you’ve been a jerk to him the whole time he’s known you? Is that not reasonable, now?” 

Ian laughs softly, “shut up.” 

“Okay, okay.” She’s smiling, “I’m gonna put Liam to bed, but thanks for callin’. Do it more often, yeah?” 

“Yeah.” 

“Okay. Love you, Ian.” 

“Love you too, Fi.” 

Neither of them hung up for a second, both hoping the other would spark up a new topic, and the conversation wouldn’t have to end there. But neither of them had anything to say, so after a while he heard her end the call. 

Sometimes Fiona was like a big kid, sometimes like a little girl who’s just trying her best, who just wants her parents to be proud of her. But she never got that. Not from Frank, not from Monica, and she’ll never let her pride down long enough to say it, but Ian knew. 

He wants to call her back, tell her how proud he is. Tell her she’s doing a good job, that she’s doing a _great_ job. 

But that’s not how their family dynamic has ever really worked, so he keeps it to himself. 

Besides, she said she had to put Liam to bed.

He hopes she knows, somehow, anyways. 

The sky is dark now, the moon is hanging high and he debates sending a picture of it to Debbie, but the camera quality on his phone isn’t good enough. So he doesn’t. 

Instead, he gets up and stretches his legs and begins the walk home. 

When he gets there, the apartment is empty, and he sends a silent thank you to whatever deity has allowed for this to happen. Lip definitely went over to Tami’s after their unsuccessful walk. 

He doesn’t know where Mickey is, and he doesn’t care. 

The conversation with Fiona keeps weighing him down. Mickey was rude first, with all his homophobic shit, but maybe he is just afraid. 

_Hah, pussy_.

Ian pushes those thoughts away, he doesn’t need to spend energy thinking about him, especially when all it does is make him upset. 

He goes to the kitchen and makes himself a sandwich with all the deli ingredients they have left. 

He takes it to the couch, watches some stupid game show he doesn’t understand with the volume down at zero. It’s just something to keep his eyes open while he eats. He doesn’t wanna fall asleep on the couch, not when he has his own bed in a room where he can lock the door. 

He puts his plate on the coffee table and lays down on the couch. 

He doesn’t fall asleep, just lets his mind run in whatever direction it wants to. He tries to force a manic episode, maybe if he’s on a high he can forget about every time he’s ever felt low. 

He wants mania without the destruction, without the chaos, without the crash. 

He wants to be happy. 

_God,_ he wants to be so happy it brings a smile to other people. He doesn’t know how to do that. Doesn’t know where his brain went, and he’s searched everywhere. It’s not in his underwear drawer and it’s not under his bed. It’s not in the kitchen on top of the fridge and it’s not in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. 

He doesn’t know what to do. 

So he lets himself cry. Tears stream down his face and the dam has been broken. Things he doesn’t allow himself to feel are all of sudden coming to the surface. 

He misses his mom. He wishes so desperately that she could be with him. She never had any good advice but she would know what he was going through. He could tell her how he felt like he was flying, and she would understand that it wasn’t a beautiful thing, not in the way everyone else seemed to view it. 

She understood that flying is fun until the atmosphere thins and you can’t breathe anymore. 

He’s never told any of his siblings that he misses her, not in any way. He knows they wouldn’t get it, their mom _sucked_. She abandoned them when they were all so young, left Fiona to raise them when she was just a kid. She only ever cared about herself.

Ian resents her so much, not for any of that, but because if he had any other mother, he might’ve been born with a brain that works. 

He ends up falling asleep on the couch anyways.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i know i said shit happens in this chapter but shit RLY goes down next chapter whoo! thank u for reading, kudos and (nice) comments mean everything!! follow me on tumblr @mckeysfirstwords if u wanna (i follow from my 1d acct)


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> i dont wanna say anything but... hell yeah baby

Lip is forcing piles of clothes into a duffle bag, getting ready for his trip to Chicago for the weekend. Ian is still endlessly jealous. 

He’s feeling better, the last two days were calm and he managed to go to work yesterday. His boss was happy to see him. 

But he can feel himself getting ready to collapse, with Lip leaving and the impending reality that he was going to spend a weekend with Mickey crashing down on him. 

Lip left around four while Mickey was out buying soap because his had run out. It took about half an hour after Lip had left for Mickey to come back. Ian was sitting at their kitchen table with a beer in hand. He was on Grindr, looking for someone to hook up with, but he couldn’t find anything he was looking for. He was debating calling Lloyd, except he’s pretty sure his wife is back in town. 

He wonders if he should go to Alice’s, just for the fun of it, just so he doesn’t have to spend the weekend trapped in a place he doesn’t want to be. 

It would be rude, though, to leave now. He doesn’t really want to leave Mickey alone in their apartment- he doesn’t know what he could do, doesn’t really wanna think about it really. 

Mickey grabbed a beer too, and sat across from him, and while he wasn’t going to up and leave the apartment, he was fine with leaving to his room and leaving Mickey in the kitchen. 

He turns off his phone after a while, none of the apps keeping him entertained anymore. He figures he might as well take a nap, maybe Mickey will be asleep when he wakes up, and he won’t have to interact with him. 

With that thought in mind he closes his eyes and begins to fall asleep. 

He wakes up around midnight, and Mickey isn’t in his bed. Maybe he fell asleep on the couch, or maybe he had the fucking balls to take Lip’s room.  It doesn’t matter, he figures, so he gets out of bed and goes to the kitchen. 

Where Mickey is standing, still drinking. 

“What are you? A fucking alcoholic?” 

“Fuck you, Gallagher, you don’t know shit about me.” 

“And we can fucking keep it that way, yeah? Pass me the bottle.” 

Ian and Mickey pass the bottle of vodka back and forth. It’s old, and him and Lip don’t typically drink vodka unless there’s a party going on. 

Mickey doesn’t seem to care, Ian doesn’t know how much vodka was in the bottle originally, but it seems Mickey’s had a good portion of it. 

They sit in silence and drink for a while, neither of them wanting to say the first word, no matter how bad the tension got. It was uncomfortable to say the least. Ian was about to say something when Mickey spoke up first. 

“Why- why do you fuckin’  _ hate  _ me so  _ much?  _ Fuck did I do?” Mickey’s eyes are focused on the floor, like he’s really trying to contemplate the hows and whys of their situation. 

“We’ve gone over this.”

“No we fuckin’ ‘aven’t.” He was looking at Ian now, and if Ian was sober he wouldn’t have thought anything of it, but his eyes were so blue, and his confusion was so genuine, that he was almost attractive. 

“Yes we have. Don’t you remember what you did?” 

Mickey’s silent for a while, trying to think of what he could’ve possibly done, and coming up with nothing. He stands fast, a little violently, and almost loses his footing. 

“Why do you hate me so much, huh?” Mickey says as he walks up to Ian, getting in his space. 

Ian pushes back, forcing Mickey up against the wall. 

“Because you’re rude, you’re ignorant, you smell like an alcoholic and you’re a fucking coward, and you know it.” Mickey’s face is inches away from his, and his eyes are focused on his mouth. 

“What did you call me?” he says, and it’s angry but soft, almost as if Ian wasn’t meant to hear it. He pushes forward. 

“A coward.” 

And then Mickey’s lips are on his, again, but this time Ian can’t pull away, not with Mickey’s hand on the back of his head, keeping him pressed against him. It takes a second for Ian to kiss back, shocked and worried he’s going to do something to make Mickey turn violent. 

But he doesn’t. When Ian starts to kiss back all Mickey does is relax into it, and kiss him harder, opening his mouth to allow the kiss to deepen. 

Ian moves the hand that found its way to the back of Mickey’s head and moves it so it’s pressed against his crotch. Mickey presses into it, grinding onto Ian’s palm. He breathes out a soft sigh, and Ian doesn’t know what to do with that. So he kisses him harder, tongue slipping into Mickey’s mouth while his hand pushes down with more pressure. 

“Are we just gonna stand here or are we gonna fucking take this shit somewhere?” Mickey said breathless when Ian moved to suck on his neck, leaving faint bruises as he went. 

Ian looked him in the eyes, and nodded, and while that wasn’t an answer, Mickey got up, and started leading them to their room. 

Ian pushed Mickey down on the bed once they got there, their shirts already discarded in the hallway, eager to get each other off.    


He pulled down Mickey’s pants quickly, not wanting to beat around the bush and get to the part where he can put his dick somewhere. Ian moved his way down, wrapping his lips around the head of Mickey’s cock.

“Don’t-” 

“Don’t suck you off?” 

“ _ Fuck _ me, Gallagher.” 

Ian didn’t need to be told twice. He hopped off Mickey and grabbed the lube in his night stand, rubbing it between his fingers to warm it up. 

Ian fucked him fast, scissoring his fingers in order to open him up faster. He was tempted to get Mickey to just do the fucking thing himself, but where’s the fun in that? 

It wasn’t long before he was slipping on a condom, and lining up his dick with Mickey’s entrance, pushing in. He doesn’t bother with the fluff, and his thrusts speed up quickly. Mickey’s moans fill up the room alongside Ian’s breathless pants.

Mickey’s tight, tighter than anyone he can remember being with, and the warmth around Ian’s cock feels like heaven. 

_ God _ , he hopes they can do this more often, because the way Mickey is so willingly giving himself to Ian should be one of the seven deadly sins. He’s aggressive, but as soon as Ian tells him to do something, he’s doing it. It’s a rush, honestly, and Ian doesn’t know how he’s meant to survive it. Every moan, every movement, every subtle  _ fuck, Gallagher  _ that escapes from Mickey’s lips makes Ian impossibly harder. 

He knows he’s found Mickey's spot when he collapses onto the bed, pressing his face against the pillow. 

_ “Harder.”  _ Ian obeys, going as hard as he can, speeding up his thrusts as much as possible. He sees Mickey wrap a hand around himself, jerking himself off in time with Ian. 

Mickey comes first, but lets Ian continue, over sensitivity making him wince with Ian’s movements. 

Ian comes not long after with a drawn out moan. He pulls out of Mickey, who breathes out in discomfort. 

Neither of them move for a moment, both sort of stunned at what just happened. Ian tries his best to wrap his mind around the situation; Mickey, who’s apparently a bottom, Mickey who’s been a dick to Ian this whole time but who kissed him first.  _ Twice. _

Ian’s confused, to say the least. 

It’s Mickey who breaks the silence. 

“Damn, Gallagher,” he says, as he gets off Ian’s bed, and puts on his boxers. Mickey came on the sheets, so Ian pulls them off and places them in his hamper, making a mental note to do his laundry before Lip comes home, lest he sees it and starts asking questions.

“So…” Ian starts, but when he looks over at Mickey, he’s facing the wall, apparently asleep. That, or he’s ignoring Ian, both are likely. 

Ian sighs, defeated, and gets in his own bed, too tired to replace the sheets. He’ll do that in the morning. 

He’ll talk to Mickey about it tomorrow. Maybe they can mend their relationship, maybe he’s not homophobic. Maybe Ian’s got him all wrong. 

+++ 

Ian does not have him all wrong. Mickey’s still a dick, that or he really doesn’t remember the night before. He doesn’t know how much or what Mickey had to drink before he joined him, but apparently it was enough to have him hungover and a little bitch. 

He doesn’t say a word to Ian. The closest they get to communication is when Mickey passes by him in their hallway and shoves his shoulder against Ian’s. 

He doesn’t get it, doesn’t get why Mickey’s only ever tried to talk to him when he’s drunk. 

Ian half wonders what Mickey would do to him if they got high together. He laughs a little at the thought, maybe they’d fuck again. He really hopes they do. He hasn’t had someone feel like that against his body in a long time. Lloyd is great, but Mickey was something else. 

Ian leaves the apartment once to get groceries, picking up some more cereal, and more beer, since Mickey has a habit of drinking in the middle of the night. 

He wants so badly to understand how he works.

He debates calling Alice, maybe she’d know something. But there’s no way he’s willing to subject himself to her smirk when he tells her his roommate isn’t exactly what he thought he’d be. She’d get too smug, telling him  _ I told you so  _ over a bowl of ramen. 

He’s getting ready to leave the store when he sees Mandy in the chips aisle. He doesn’t know whether or not he should say hi, but in the end she’s the one who goes up to him. 

“Ian!” she says when she spots him. He wonders how dumb he must look, just staring at her in the middle of a grocery store. Mandy walks up to him and gives him a quick hug. He doesn’t know if she’s just naturally that affectionate, or if she got that from Alice, but either way, the gentleness is welcome. 

“Hey, Mandy.” He smiles at her, and despite how tired and drained he is from the past twenty four hours, trying to dissect a brain that isn’t his, the smile is genuine. “What are you doing here? I thought you lived up near Alice?” 

“I do, but my brother lives around here, and he called me earlier today about some boy that was driving him crazy, so I’m bringing him some snacks because I’m the only decent member of my family.” Ian laughs, sisters are always more functional than their brothers, Fiona being a good example. 

“Well, enjoy that.” Ian didn’t know what to say, if he was in a normal headspace he might even offer advice, but he also had a boy driving him to the brink of insanity, and he didn’t know what to do about it either. He sympathizes with Mandy’s brother. 

She laughs lightly, “I absolutely will not. The guy’s an idiot, but I love him anyways.” 

“Most guys are idiots.” 

“You, Ian, are absolutely right. Now I’m going to grab some ice cream, because no matter how much of a tough guy he pretends to be, he’s cookie dough’s  _ bitch,”  _ she smiles, Ian smiles back and they part ways. 

He likes her, he thinks. He’s gonna have to ask Alice to get them all together one of these days. 

The idea of going home seems so tiring, so after paying for his groceries, he sets off in the direction of the park. He sits against a tree and pulls out the pack of cigarettes he’d just purchased. 

The bark feels rough against his back, and it itches a little bit, but it’s fine. The discomfort feels familiar. It’s been a long time since his body last buzzed with the feeling of content. There are memories tied to parks like these. Parks in the middle of a city with no one around. It reminds him of the days when Monica was still around, and she’d take them to the park and spin them around with her palms facing the sky. 

She would tell them to make wishes on three leaf clovers because three quarters of your wish coming true is better than none of it. Ian held onto that for a long time, but sometimes three quarters isn’t enough. Sometimes you need the whole wish to come true for it to count. 

He wished for things to get better too many times and it never got  _ better  _ it just decreased in being worse. 

There were squirrels and birds in the trees teasing one another. It made him laugh, not loud enough that anyone else would’ve ever picked up on it, but it made him feel just a tiny bit warmer against all the cold.

The tree reminds him of the boys he’d take to the park late at night, his best friends. He remembers leaning up against a tree similar to the one he was pressed again, inching his hand closer to the boy sitting next to him. 

He remembers being so naive, he remembers locking their pinkies together and thinking that it meant something. 

His first kiss was in the middle of the night, underneath a tree that was barren from the dead of winter. His lips were cold, and so were the other boys, but they still managed to be soft, they still managed to be everything Ian needed in that moment. 

The boy never spoke to him again, despite Ian reaching out multiple times. 

Looking back, he gets it. He was awkward, and he tried too hard. His dad was known for being the town drunk, always ending up passed out in someone’s front yard. No one wants to be with a Gallagher. 

He would wish so hard he would tear up. He would remake the world if it meant it gave him a second chance at all the dumb shit he’s ever done. 

Three quarters isn’t good enough. Ian was stupid to believe it ever could be. 

He scrolls through Instagram to pass the time, comments  _ great job, man! _ on one of Carl’s pictures of him with his acceptance letter into West Point, he has a straight face but Ian knows how much he’s worked to get there, knows how proud he must be. 

Carl responds quickly with a middle finger emoji. It makes Ian laugh. 

Most of his feed are pictures of Amy and Jemma, thanks to Kev who doesn’t post much of anything else. He doesn’t mind, he likes the girls, they were always fun to have around the house, even if Ian never spent all that much time around them. 

He decides to get up and start making his way home before the sun goes down. His head feels empty, and for the first time in a while, he feels like he could float. There aren’t any weights attached to his legs making him sink to the bottom of an ocean and then further down. He doesn’t know what it is, but he’s calm walking home. He’s leveled. 

It’s a strange thing when a Gallagher is quiet. They exist so brashly and boldly that it’s hard to take them all in sometimes. He wonders what it’s like to be somebody else trying to absorb them. He wonders how Elaine feels during their sessions, seeing someone so loud and so bright feel so small. He’s guilty, that he’s not the way everyone else seems to be all the time. 

With Fiona, she’s always got a comeback on the tip of her tongue, ready to defend her kids no matter the cost. Carl always has some sort of inappropriate question that he’s definitely already looked up, he just wants to hear somebody say it. Lip was too smart for his own good, and while he tended to be the quietest of them all, he still always had something to say. 

And Debbie? Ian’s never known anyone who can cry as much as she can. 

Ian, he’s the only one who gets still when he’s quiet. You could skip rocks on his silence. 

But this time isn’t like that. He’s taking in everything around him, the details he hadn’t picked up before. There’s a woman with a blue streak in her hair, he sees doormen through the windows of the building waving to the father and his daughter that were walking in. 

There are so many things to see, so much to learn about people. 

Ian was mesmerized, and he must’ve looked ridiculous. Who in New York stands planted in the middle of a sidewalk staring into all the buildings. People were pushing him to the side so they could get around him. A thousand hands pushed him, trying to get him to budge, but he had dug his feet below the concrete. He was a tree, just the one he had been leaning against. Staring around at the people beside him. 

His phone buzzed in his pocket. It was what shook him out of his dazed state, and forced him to start on his walk home again.

He pushes open the door with his shoulder, hands occupied with the bags. 

He climbs up the flights of stairs slowly, trying to delay his arrival. But eventually (unfortunately), his feet carried him up to the last step. 

He begins to put the groceries away, putting the reeses cups in the freezer so he could binge eat all of them in the middle of the night the next time he was unable to sleep.

He doesn’t register the carton of cookie dough ice cream. 

“I bought some beer,” he says as he walks into the living room where Mickey is sitting on the couch, not paying attention to the show in front of him, choosing to scroll through his phone instead. 

“Cool. Yeah” he says without looking up. Neither of them say anything for a minute, and after a while Ian realizes this wasn’t going to go anywhere anyways, he decides to bear the awkwardness and watch whatever Mickey had put on. 

Great British Baking Show. 

Ian smiled internally at the thought of tough guy Mickey Milkovich watching a baking show for fun. 

Except he’s not really watching, he’s scowling at his phone and making a point to not look Ian in the eye. He’s sick of it. Mickey is so fucking confusing it drives him nuts sometimes. He wants to probe, wants to ask questions, there has to be something about him that makes him a human being. 

When Ian first met him, he thought Mickey was gonna beat the shit out of him, despite the fact that he’s like five feet tall. Mickey still hates him, except when he’s drunk. Or maybe he still hates him, he’s just horny. Ian doesn’t know but  _ God  _ he wishes he did. 

He watches him as Mickey seems to think about something, and a part of Ian wants to be a dick and tell Mickey he didn’t know he could do that. But Mickey opens his mouth before Ian gets the chance. 

“Yo, Gallagher, could you turn down the sound of the TV?” 

“Why the fuck do I have to do it?” 

“Because it’s closer to you.” 

“What if I don’t want to move?” Ian could very well get the remote, but doing anything because Mickey asks doesn’t sound like a fun idea. 

“You gotta be such a little bitch all the time? Jesus, fuck.” Ian snorts, many comments about how  _ Mickey _ was the one who was last night’s bottom running through his head. He didn’t say anything, not wanting Mickey to storm off and throw a tantrum. 

“What the fuck is so funny?” Ian raised an eyebrow at him and rolled his eyes, turning his focus back to the TV, and away from Mickey. 

Ian didn’t notice how red Mickey’s cheeks got, he didn’t notice the gulp he took to try to calm himself down, he didn’t notice Mickey’s eyes darting back and forth between him and his phone. 

Ian didn’t notice a lot of things. 

They didn’t talk for the rest of the afternoon, but Ian could tell they both had something they wanted to say. He didn’t want to know what was going through Mickey’s mind that was making him sit so still and uncomfortably. 

He crawled into bed around ten, way earlier than normal, but he was tired, and there was too much tension in the living room where Mickey was sitting watching TV. Ian laid on his side, phone in hand, looking through the notifications he’d ignored throughout the day. 

The most recent one is from Lip, saying he would be home the next day at around noon. Ian felt relieved, he couldn’t handle more of the day he had endured, there were only so many meaningless tasks he could complete before they had more groceries than they could afford. 

Ian had work tomorrow at two, which means he’d be home when Lip got back. He doesn’t know whether or not he should say something to Lip. On one hand, it’s killing him, and he knows Lip wouldn’t say anything. On the other hand, he knows Mickey clearly doesn’t want anyone knowing anything, and Ian doesn’t want to out him. 

Kind of. 

He goes with the former option. 

_ i need to talk to you tmrw  _

_?  _

_ dw about it. ill tell u tmrw  _

_ Ok  _

Ian turns off his phone and drops onto his chest. 

_ Don’t think _ , he tells himself.  _ Not right now.  _

He falls asleep, and doesn’t dream. 

+++ 

Lip’s flight ended up getting delayed, and there was too much traffic, meaning Ian left for work before he showed up. Considering Ian’s plans to talk to him about his situation with Mickey, this almost works out better in his favor. He won’t have to rush his conversation with Lip, trying to get all the things he needs to say out before leaving to ring up potato chips for fourteen year olds. 

Work is busier than usual, with some friend group coming in and buying half their stock of chocolate candy. They try to buy cigarettes, and Ian is so tired he almost lets it slide, but he knows his boss wouldn’t approve, and she’s so nice to him that he doesn’t want to ruin that. 

The kids are disappointed, but he knows they have other ways to get what they want. 

Alice calls him halfway through his shift.

“Hi!” she says when he picks up the call. She’s usually perky but this was a different level. He could hear her excitement from a single word. 

He was hesitant with his reply. “Hi?” 

“So,” she started, “Mands told me you ran into her at the store the other day and she said you guys talked for a brief minute and I was just thinking, like, wouldn’t it be so fun if the three of us got together? I mean she’s my girlfriend, you’re my best friend, and you and Mandy are pretty much friends anyways, I just think it is a neat idea, yessir.” 

“Are you coked up or something? Jesus, speak slower.” 

“No but I’m definitely high, and Mandy is definitely over, and we definitely just had sex.” 

“Things I didn’t care to know,” he says, but it’s light, and of course he had to know. She’s his best friend, his family. He tells her about all the guys he’s ever been with, and she always replies with equal enthusiasm or disgust, depending on how Ian felt. 

All the guys but one. 

“Of course you need to know,” she scoffs. “Anyway! I think you should come over this weekend. I’ll provide the weed if you provide the alcohol.” She sounded completely smug, like this was the greatest plan ever and she was a genius for coming up with it. 

“Sounds good, Lili.” He picked up the nickname when he went over for a family dinner to meet her parents. They thought he was her boyfriend, and the situation was so weird for the both of them that it ended up causing Alice’s coming out. Her parents were wonderful about it, thank God. Ian doesn’t know how he would’ve handled watching his best friend get disowned by her parents for her sexuality. 

“Hey!” she laughs, “that nickname is for family only!” 

Ian gasps, offended. 

“Am I not family?” 

“Babe, of course you are, you know that I'm just teasing. Gotta go, Mandy’s back.” He can tell she winked, based on the tongue click that went with it. “I’ll see you this weekend then! Love youuuuu.” 

“Love you, too. Have fun!” 

“Oh you know I will.” And with that, she hangs up, and leaves Ian alone in a silent store again. 

He doesn’t want to sit in the quiet, though, so he plugs his earbuds into his phone and puts on his playlist, putting it on shuffle. 

The first song that comes up is  _ Why’d You Only Call Me When You’re High?  _ by The Arctic Monkeys. Ian looks up at the ceiling, staring down God. It’s unfair that this is the first song that pops up, it hits too close to home. 

He sings along to it anyways, getting louder with each passing lyric. No one’s in there at the moment, so he feels free to act as stupid as he pleases. 

_ “Now it’s three in the morning, and I’m tryna change your mind. Left you multiple missed calls and to my message you replied: why’d you only call me when you’re high?”  _ Ian was close to belting at that point, singing along at the top of his lungs when Mickey walked in. 

“Yeah?” 

“Fuck off.” 

Ian tried to keep a straight face, but he could feel his cheeks heating up. He couldn’t begin to imagine how red his pale cheeks were becoming. He lowered the volume on his earbuds self consciously, afraid Mickey would hear what he was listening to, as if he didn’t walk in on Ian singing it as loud as he could. 

Maybe he didn’t recognize it. Maybe he didn’t catch the lyrics. 

Ian watches as Mickey walks around the store. He doesn’t get why he came all the way out here, there are other places to shop much closer to where they live. But he wasn’t going to question it, afraid to set him off. 

Mickey grabs barbecue chips and a snickers that he unwraps and starts eating before paying for it. 

“You gonna pay for that?” Ian asks with the cockiest look he can muster. 

“Yeah, I’m gonna fucking pay. I don’t know what you think I am, but I’m not some lowlife criminal that goes around stealing goddamn snickers bars. You don’t know me at all, okay? So stop trying to act like you do.” Mickey said as he slapped a ten dollar bill on the counter and walked away. 

Ian wishes he did. He wants so badly to get to know Mickey. He wanted to before, just to try to understand how someone could be so entirely crude. But now, he just kind of wants to be on talking terms. He wants to offer him a beer when he gets one for himself and watch The Great British Baking Show in silence without it being so heavy and loaded, at least from Ian’s side. 

More than anything he wants to talk to Mickey about how good the sex was, maybe get him to agree that they should do it more often. 

He sighs, and pockets the change that he would’ve given to Mickey, had he stayed long enough to collect it. 

Maybe if he wasn’t such a standoffish asshole, Ian would’ve even considered giving him the money when he got home. 

A couple more hours go by. An elderly lady walks in asking for cigarettes, a middle aged woman walks in with a much younger man whom Ian can’t tell whether he’s her son or her boyfriend. Either way, they buy more salt and vinegar chips than he even knew they had in stock. There was a very shy girl, no older than sixteen, coming in and trying to buy beer. She said it was for her dad who was already too drunk to go out to purchase anything, he didn’t know whether or not she was lying, but he took pity on her and let her buy a case.

He remembers in Chicago how his boss always let him do the same.

He turns off the neon open sign and tidies up the place at around nine. He doesn’t care enough to make sure everything’s as neat as possible, deciding to leave that up for whoever has the morning shift the next day. 

Besides, he has to talk to Lip. 

The walk home went by quickly, that or he just wasn’t paying enough attention to notice how long it actually took. 

He got home, took off his shoes and set them by the door, and walked straight into Lip’s room. Mickey wasn’t in the kitchen, and he wasn’t in the living room either, so either he was locked up in their room, or he was out doing whatever the fuck he does when he’s not home being a dick. 

“Hey, man.” Lip said when Ian opened his door. Ian nodded back. “What’s up?” Lip seemed concerned, and Ian didn’t know whether or not he should comfort him about it. Maybe Lip wouldn’t find it such a big deal. 

“Is Mickey home?” Lip shook his head no. 

“Nah, he left without saying much a while ago. Hasn’t come back yet.”

Ian doesn’t know how to say it, so he stands there for a minute, completely useless, swaying back and forth on the balls of his feet.

“Ian. What is it?” Lip looks genuinely worried. 

“It’s about Mickey,” he manages to force out. 

“What about Mickey? Did he do something? I told you, man, I’ll kick his fuckin’ ass to the curb if you want me to, you’re my brother and-” 

“Mickey and I fucked,” he blurts out, completely interrupting whatever Lip was planning on saying. He appreciates his brother defending him, from the way Mickey’s been acting lately, so hostile.

“What?” Lip’s eyebrows shot all the way up, he put out the cigarette he was about to take a drag from, clearly invested in the situation. 

“We fucked.” 

“I mean yeah, I got that much, dickhead, I’m not deaf. But like- how?” He’s at a loss for words and Ian can tell. It makes him laugh, it’s always funny seeing Lip trying to figure out an equation he can’t solve. 

“We were drunk, I guess. We had kind of an argument and he kissed me and then we fucked. I don’t understand what’s so complicated about this.” he shrugs. 

“What’s so complicated is that I was convinced he was straight and you were convinced he was homophobic.” 

“Well clearly not.” 

They’re both silent for a moment, Ian because he doesn’t know what else to say and Lip because he’s trying to wrap his head around everything that’s being said. 

“And he kissed you, right?” 

“Yeah, the first time he was just trying to mock me-” 

_ “The first time?”  _

Ian nods sheepishly. 

Lip laughs a little, dumbfounded. “He can’t even, like, write this off. He can’t even say he just needed someone to fuck. Kissing… that’s some gay shit, Ian. Good for you. When’s the wedding?” 

If this was with any other guy, Ian would laugh, knowing he does tend to fall quickly, always has, ever since he was a teenager. 

But Mickey was different. 

Mickey didn’t like him. 

“Very funny. No, um, Mickey sort of hates me? Maybe it was a mistake, I don’t know. He doesn’t talk to me unless it’s to say some bitchy remark.” 

“You wanna fuck him again, don’t you?” 

Ian feels himself getting red, and he feels embarrassed at the truth of the statement. Lip notices, because of course he does, and he laughs at Ian’s expense. Ian throws a dirty sock that he picked up from the floor onto him. 

“The sex wasn’t bad!” 

Lip hums, still laughing. 

“Jesus, Ian. You couldn’t have kept it in your pants? He’s our roommate!” Lip is serious but Ian knows he’s just joking. 

“Yeah, okay, keep that energy next time you invite Tami over.” 

“Fuck off! At least she’s not repressed.” 

Ian should laugh at that, it should be funny, but for some reason it doesn’t hit him the way Lip is intending it to- as a joke. Instead it hurts a little bit, scrapes shallowly but scrapes nonetheless. If his assumptions are right, about what Mickey is going through, he knows it’s not fun at all. Being out is hard, and maybe Mickey isn’t ready to do that. 

Maybe he’s not even gay, though, maybe Ian was just an experiment. 

“You good, man?” 

“Yeah. He’s just confusing, you know?” 

“He’s pretty normal with me. Even talked about all the girls he’s been with, apparently his dad was a pimp.” Lip throws it out like it means nothing, but something in his chest sinks down to his toes, he feels himself crush it with his feet. 

Maybe Mickey also liked women, but with every word that comes out of Lip’s mouth, Ian’s starting to feel more and more like he really was just Mickey’s drunken mistake. 

Except he can’t even check, because Mickey won’t fucking talk to him. 

“Earth to Ian? You were saying he’s confusing?” 

Ian smiles weakly.

“Yeah, when he’s drunk he talks to me, he’ll look me in the eye and it seems that for that second he doesn’t want to throw me out the window. But the next day, the second he’s sober, he’s telling me that I don’t know shit, and to leave him the fuck alone. I don’t know what to do. I’m also just tired. Maybe this would be easier if my head wasn’t such a mess.” Lip smiles sympathetically. 

“Do we have any beer?” 

“Yeah I bought some the other day.” Ian gets up and leaves to grab them each a bottle from the fridge, pausing when he realizes his bedroom door is shut when it wasn’t when he got home. Mickey must’ve gotten back. Ian debates changing topics when he gets back to Lip, but there’s a part of him that doesn’t care. A part that wants Mickey to know he’s talking about him, maybe he’ll listen and say something when Ian goes to their room to sleep. 

Unlikely. 

“Are you planning on doing anything about it?” Lip asks when he walks back into his room. 

Ian takes a swig from the bottle before replying. “Fuck no.” 

“Classic. Of course you aren’t.” 

“The fuck is that supposed to mean.” 

Lip smiles in a way Ian hasn’t seen since they were teens sharing a room constantly teasing each other. 

“Means you’re a pussy.” 

“Shut up, dick,” he says with a laugh, smiling as he brings the beer back up to his lips. 

“No, but seriously. Do you have any idea what you want to do?” 

Ian shakes his head, “No. I don’t think it’s possible to have any idea at all when it comes to dealing with him. He’s so back and forth he should be the bipolar one.” 

“You don’t have to be bipolar to be batshit.” 

“True.” 

Lip’s phone lights up with a notification. 

“It’s Tami, she’s home alone and, y’know, didn’t get to fuck anyone while I was gone.” 

“Aren’t you and Tami supposed to be a casual thing?” 

Lip eyes him in a way that Ian knows means  _ shut up.  _

It’s a few minutes after he leaves that Ian realizes he’s spending another night in the apartment with Mickey. 

He shudders at the thought, but goes to his room anyway. It was his space first, he was going to own it. It didn’t matter whether or not Mickey felt like being an ass. 

When he walks in the first thing he notices is the wind and how unnecessarily cold it was. The second thing he noticed was the joint between Mickey’s fingers, and the smell of weed that came along with it. 

Ian decided that it was as good a plan as any, and went through his sock drawer, looking for the bag of weed he keeps hidden so Lip doesn’t grab it, even though he knows Lip grabs it anyway. 

He takes the first drag, and relaxes against his headboard. It doesn’t take long for him to start feeling loopy, and a little giggly. Everything is tinted and there’s a fuzzy sort of vignette border making everything seem softer. 

He’s not supposed to get high, it fucks with his bipolar, he’s not supposed to drink either, but that’s never stopped him. 

He likes how he feels. He likes getting high, especially. It makes him feel more like himself before he had his first episode. It was like mania, in a way. He laughed too much and he would dance around the room, singing along to a song that wasn’t playing. It was like mania, but it was manageable. It was something he was choosing for that moment to partake it. 

He had no choice over his bipolar, no choice when he was high or when he was low. 

With drugs at least there was a time and place.

He looks over at Mickey who’s staring out the window with such a focused gaze, and he starts to laugh, the sound bubbling out of him. 

Mickey looks over at him and scowls, and Ian has never seen something as funny as Mickey scowling. He looked like an angry bird with eyebrows drawn on, and Ian couldn’t take it seriously. 

He laughs harder. 

“What the fuck is so funny?” 

And Ian couldn’t reply, not enough air in his body, not enough air in the world. He gestured to Mickey, trying to non-verbally explain that he just looked so… 

Ian couldn’t find a word to put to it. 

He calms down for a second, but when he looks over at Mickey, joint thrown in the ashtray on his dresser, arms crossed over his chest, he loses it again. 

His cheeks burn from laughing, and he feels young. He feels like he’s fifteen and nothing is important. He’s not that old, not really, and he knows Fiona would chastise him for ever thinking otherwise, but he’s been through shit, they all have. And it ages you, makes you forget about all the good things about being in your twenties. 

He’s supposed to be learning how to fly, not locking himself in his room so nobody can reach him. 

He’s lost in his own thoughts until he hears Mickey’s laugh join in, very quietly at first. His head snaps toward him, smile wide, and Mickey tries to stifle his laughter, but isn’t able to. 

Ian briefly notes how their laughter mixes well together. How their voices seem to slot together neatly. 

Ian gets off his bed and puts his phone on his nightstand, opening up his playlist and pressing play.  _ Longshot  _ by Catfish & The Bottlemen starts to pour out of his speakers. 

“This is my  _ song.”  _ And maybe it wasn’t, but Ian couldn’t remember anything holding more meaning in that very moment than the bassline of that song. He couldn’t remember feeling anything greater than the picked guitar chords, or the drums, or Van McCann’s voice singing about things that didn’t necessarily resonate with him. 

But it didn’t matter. He felt  _ good _ . The song made him feel  _ good _ . He didn’t care about the people outside and their lives, he didn’t want to invest time in thinking about anybody else, for once it was enough to be invested in himself. 

He was twirling in his room, listening to the cacophony that was the music coming from his shitty speakers and Mickey laughing at him. But it didn’t feel cruel, not in the way a lot of things about Mickey feel. It felt like Mickey was happy with Ian, like he was dancing even though he was sitting on his bed. 

But laying in his bed wasn’t going to cut it for Ian, not in that moment. He threw all his inhibitions to the wind, and asked Mickey to dance with him, shaking his shoulders in a way that was meant to be suggestive, but probably didn’t come across that way. 

Mickey smiled wider, and for a brief second Ian almost had the urge to call him pretty. 

“Come on, come dance,” Ian pouted. 

Mickey shook his head no, looking Ian up and down. It made his body feel warm and blushy, and he was too high to try to decipher what that was supposed to mean. He took a drag from his joint, letting the smoke fill him up until he was just a little uncomfortable, and then exhaling. 

He looked out the window, looked down at all the people on the sidewalk. 

He smiled at them.  _ To be alive and living _ , he thought. 

“Gallagher, you’re gonna fall out the goddamn window, and I’m gonna fuckin’ laugh when you do.” Mickey’s voice was higher when he wasn’t pretending to be some version of himself that other people were supposed to see.

Mickey wasn’t hiding from him, not in that moment. He was leaning back against the wall, watching Ian move around the room. He wasn’t even smoking, he was revelling in the feeling of being high in the way he would around anyone. Ian wasn’t an exception. 

The chorus of the song hit, and Ian couldn’t help it, he grabbed Mickey by the hand, ignoring his pleas, and pulled him up. 

He must’ve used a little too much force, that or Mickey must’ve moved forward once he stood up, he doesn’t know, doesn’t much care. All he knows is that Mickey is an inch away from him, and they’re both standing still, everything around them completely forgotten. 

Mickey is warm against his chest, and his eyes are impossibly blue, though dark, and a little hooded. His pupils are blown wide and his mouth is hanging open. Ian wonders if Mickey is taking him in the same way he’s trying to drink in everything that is anything about the man in front of him. 

Mickey’s eyes move down from where they’re locked with Ian’s to his mouth. He watches Mickey’s eyes trace the movement of his tongue as Ian licks his lips. He doesn’t know who makes the first move, who moves in first, but he knows they do, watches as Mickey closes his eyes. He wraps his arms around Mickey’s back, ready to pull him and close the fraction of a distance between them. 

And then Mickey’s phone rings. 

Mickey pushes him away, but he looks embarrassed. He looks like he wants to say something, call him a fag and storm off, but a part of him knows he doesn’t have the right to say anything to Ian at that moment. He wanted it too. 

“What the fuck do you want, Terry?” 

Ian’s never seen him get so cold so quickly, not even with him. He knows he should step out, give them some privacy, but he doesn’t have to, because not even thirty seconds later and Mickey is grabbing his jacket that was thrown on the floor and storming off, refusing to look Ian in the eye. 

Ian doesn’t have the space to feel hurt, he doesn’t want to. Feeling hurt would mean too much, and he doesn’t want to get into that. He does turn his music off though, and the room feels cramped in the silence. 

He doesn’t smoke the rest of his joint. He doesn’t do much of anything, his good mood completely gone. 

He goes to the kitchen to grab some cheese puffs, since it’s the only thing he ever craves when he’s high. When he goes back to his room, he goes straight to Mickey’s bed. He feels bad about it, but he wants to find something he can hold against him, maybe even just steal his weed, so he can hold it over his head and force him to talk. 

He doesn’t find anything, so he collapses on his roommate’s bed, and tries to look for something in the ceiling that isn’t a penis. He has a hard time, but he finds one that looks weirdly like an ear, and that makes him smile. 

He speaks to it, maybe it’ll listen. 

“Are all guys meant to be this confusing? I mean- I don’t think I am?” he gasps. “ _ Am I?  _ No, I can’t be. I’m a  _ nice  _ guy, I don’t not talk the next day just because I’m a pussy. I would say you are what you eat but that would make him a dick. Ha.” Ian laughs at his own joke, trying to find light in the situation. 

He didn’t really find any. 

“Am I just doomed to be alone forever? Like what’s so bad about me? I mean, no, I get it. There’s too many fucking versions of me to deal with, I come with too many problems. No one wants that. Some people are alcoholics and some people go to jail but they… they can get over that. They can get out of jail and they can go to rehab and I’m stuck with this piece of shit brain for the rest of my life. The closest I can get to feeling normal is taking a whole bunch of fuckin’ pills and crossing my fingers like a little girl in hopes that it’ll work and it’s not fair.” 

Ian’s never usually sad while he’s high, but the lack of filter makes his worst thoughts shine through when he does get down.    


He pauses for a second- thinks about his situation, how he's talking to an ear shaped stain on the ceiling. He starts to laugh at himself and doesn’t stop. Laughs until his sides hurt and until there are tears pooling in his eyes. 

He takes a few deep breaths, tries to calm himself down. He finds that when he does calm down, that all he wants to do is sleep. 

He doesn’t bother getting out of bed, shuts the window from where he’s sitting, places the bag of cheese puffs on the floor, and goes to sleep. 

He barely registers the fact that that bed he’s sleeping in isn’t his. 

Ian wakes up the next morning in Mickey’s bed. A part of him feels bad, but apparently it didn’t affect Mickey all that much, since on the other side of their room there he was laying on top of Ian’s covers. 

He had a black eye and his knuckles were bruised. Ian wanted to comfort him, ask him what was wrong, but there was no way Mickey would ever open up, he would never allow himself to be vulnerable in front of Ian. 

He gets up, pushes himself out of bed. 

Something told him it was going to be a long week. 

+++ 

He was right. It was. 

But it was Saturday, finally, and he was getting ready to go over to Alice’s. 

Him and Mickey hadn’t spoken all week. They somehow managed to avoid even asking the other to pass the butter during breakfast. If Ian didn’t already know Mickey could speak he would’ve thought he was actually mute.

He wanted to be okay with it, he wanted to be comfortable in the fact that he was disliked, but a part of it broke his heart. Maybe he could’ve done something to change his mind. Maybe he shouldn’t have been so quick to judge him. Mickey doesn’t seem so bad, the more he gets to know him, in those rare moments where the world spins a little slower and Mickey smiles with his eyes. 

It’s weird, there are moments now he wants to rewind and redo. Moments. Plural. 

He’s had experiences with Mickey Milkovich that he’d care to repeat. If someone had told him that when Mickey had first moved in, he would’ve laughed and walked away. 

He wants to go back and make sure Mickey had his phone on silent. He wanted so badly to do something with him that wasn’t in the spirit of aggression. He doesn’t exactly get why. He doesn’t like Mickey, the guy sucks. 

(He knows why, he just doesn’t want to say it, or think it. Doesn’t want the thought to manifest itself in any way. It's a dangerous game, letting yourself think unhinged). 

So he doesn’t like Mickey, he doesn’t, he just wants the tension to dissipate between them. He wants to exist within the same plane of existence as Mickey Milkovich, sober, without feeling like his head was going to explode. 

There was a wall between them, and he wanted to take a hammer and tear it down. He preferred the days where Mickey would call him an ass and tell him to fuck off over this radio silence. The worst part of it all is that he comes home from work most days only to find Lip and Mickey watching an action movie together, talking over the film's dialogue. There’s the empty chair in the corner of the living room that’s never occupied, like they’re expecting Ian to fill it up one day. 

Someday he’s going to come home from work and sit down in that chair. He won’t say anything, he’ll just sit on his phone, but will actively and positively exist in the presence of Mikhailo Milkovich and the world won’t burn. 

He had changed his shirt about six times, everything was making him feel like his skin was trying to crawl off his body. The only people that were going to see him were Alice and Mandy, he doesn’t understand why he’s caring so much. He’s nervous, sort of. He hasn’t done anything with friends in a while, and he kind of wants Mickey to think he’s leaving to go have a good time. He wants to look good. If not for anybody else, then for himself. 

When he walks out of his room, Mickey is in the kitchen making ramen. He doesn’t look in Ian’s direction. 

He goes through the motions of getting to Alice’s apartment, stopping at the store to grab a few bottles of wine. He would typically go for beer, especially if he was going to hang out with Lip or any of his friends and family from back home. 

But Alice is his  _ girl _ , he knows she prefers wine over beer (and, besides, it’ll get him drunk faster).

Ian knocks on her door around eight thirty. She opens it almost immediately, wrapping her arms around his neck. She already smelled faintly of weed. 

“Ian! Come in!” she notices the bag in his hand holding the bottles of wine. “And you didn’t bring beer. I love you.” He laughs and sets all the bottles on the kitchen counter, grabbing one and bringing it to the living room where Mandy was sitting next to the coffee table. 

“Hey, Mandy,” he smiled at her. It was nice to be around people who weren’t Mickey or his brother. People who were around him simply because they wanted to be. 

She waved back, a piece of bread in her hand, and he’s assuming another in her mouth, if the fact that she wasn’t speaking to him was any clue. 

They opened the first bottle, just him and Mandy, and each took sips of it while they waited for Alice to get back with the wine glasses.

“Babe! Hurry up, asshole, we wanna drink,” her words were slow, and Ian could already picture the contrast between her and Alice. Her slow, crawling words, versus Alice and her unnecessarily fast paced vocabulary. She spoke to him entirely in Portuguese once, and he didn’t understand a single word of it, but remembers nodding along like everything was making perfect sense. 

Alice comes back with three glasses of wine, plus the next bottle, and some chocolate. A few years ago, Ian would’ve been too self conscious to spend an evening curled up against the couch on the floor, talking to his friends over wine and chocolate. It’s such a  _ girl  _ thing to do, he feels, but he also appreciates not having to worry about appearances, or what he  _ should  _ do. 

It’s nice, it’s simple. 

“ _ Oh  _ my  _ God _ ,” Alice starts, “I was in class the other day, and I’m pretty sure my history professor was checking me out.” 

“Can you blame him?” Mandy says, completely genuinely. It’s sweet, and the sweetness of it makes Ian smile. 

Alice snorts, “No. But it was weird. I don’t know- old men are gross.” 

“How do you know he was checking you out?” Alice gasps and leans back, mock offended. She points an accusatory finger in Ian’s face. 

“Do you doubt me, Mr. Gallagher?” 

He laughs, and it makes her break and laugh with him. 

“No he was just… giving me vibes. Like he kept looking at me during the entire lecture, and when I walked in he said hi to  _ me  _ and just  _ me  _ in this super creepy tone, y’know?” Mandy nodded, like this was a universal girl experience, and maybe it was, and Ian would never know. 

“I get that. I got checked out by some creep in the grocery story the other day. He called me sweetheart and everything. I wanted to pass out right in the middle of the fruit aisle.” 

Ian looks between the two of them, dumbfounded. 

“People just treat you guys like this all the time?” He’s met with a deadpan chorus of yesses from the two of them. “Jesus.” 

“You’d never do that, would you?” Mandy asks, and she’s holding a piece of bread like it’s a shiv, pointing it straight at Ian’s neck. Ian doesn’t know whether or not he’s allowed to laugh. 

“Amanda. He’s gay.” 

“So is my brother, but he still used to do that to impress my dad.” They both go silent for a minute, and there is a conversation that occurs between them that Ian doesn’t get to be a part of. 

He clears his throat after a beat of nobody talking, drinks the rest of the wine in his glass and refills it. “Speaking of your brother, how’s he doing?” 

“Huh?” Alice asks. He sees Mandy put a hand on her thigh, for no reason other than to be near her. He finds himself smiling at the two of them, and wishing he could have something that resembled what was in front of him. 

“We ran into each other the other day, when I went to talk to my shit-head brother.” Alice nods and ushers for Mandy to keep going. “No he’s just… so fucking dumb, y’know? Like here’s this guy who seems to  _ clearly  _ like him and he pretends to still hate him and for what? Because he’s emotionally constipated.” Ian starts laughing, and it just encourages Mandy to keep going. “And he,  _ God,  _ he’s so  _ scared _ . He’s scared of our dad, he’s scared of this boy finding out he’s into him, he’s scared of  _ everything!  _ I tell him  _ ‘hey, if he’s had sex with you, he must be mildly interested in you’  _ but he always tells me I’m wrong and that this guy doesn’t even talk to him but it’s not like he talks to him either, right? Anyway he drives me crazy, Lili- fill up my glass pretty please.” 

He watches as Alice fills up her wine glass and leans in to kiss her. He watches their smiles and he feels like he should look away, there was something too personal there. 

He thinks about what Mandy had said, how it hit a little too close to home. Maybe that’s how Mickey’s feeling. Maybe he feels like  _ Ian  _ is the one at fault. Ian can’t imagine that being true, Mickey’s always more hostile towards him.

But at the same time, he always initiated things when they were alone. 

He pauses, his wine drunk brain as flushed as his face, and tries to connect dots that weren’t given to him. 

“Hey, wait, Mandy.” He waits for Mandy to look at him, realizing he was interrupting the two of them being gross and messily making out in front of him. “Mandy,” he asks again. This time she looks up, raising her eyebrows as a response. “What did you say your brother’s name was?” 

She snorts. 

“Well it should be dumbass.” And with that she returns to Alice, not bothering anymore with their conversation. 

Ian’s more confused than he’s ever been. He feels like it’s a sign, and he sort of wants to run back to Brooklyn, back to their apartment, and force Mickey to have a conversation. 

He spends the rest of the night thinking as Mandy and Alice talk around him. He drank enough wine to get him feeling pleasantly flushed from the alcohol, but not enough to where he’s completely drunk and incoherent. 

He keeps thinking back to what Mandy said. How her brother thought the other guy was the one being standoffish. He doesn’t talk to Mickey either, and the only times they’ve ever talked sober it’s not like he was friendly by any means. Ian suddenly feels guilty, he shouldn’t have treated Mickey the way he did. 

Except, no, Mickey started the whole mess. If he wasn’t such a massive  _ dick  _ to Ian when they first met then maybe they would be on better terms. 

Mickey,  _ Jesus,  _ he was so frustrating. He was a rubiks cube turned human, it took too much twisting and untwisting to get him to be  _ normal _ . The twisting and untwisting could be lubed by alcohol and weed, but it still wasn’t fun to get Mickey Milkovich to behave like a person.

The ‘what if’ kept running through his mind.  _ What if  _ Mickey didn’t hate Ian, he was just afraid of what Ian would say?  _ What if  _ he thought Ian was the one at fault? 

It wasn’t true, it’s just what the alcohol in his system was telling him.

He eventually rejoined the conversation, and they talked for hours about tv shows and and boys and how cold it was, mundane things. Ian tried his best to keep up with their talks of college, but the highest level of education that he’d ever gotten was his senior year of high school in one of the shittiest public schools in South Side Chicago. 

He didn’t mind, he liked listening to the talk, he liked how they bounced off one another so easily. 

He really liked Mandy, too, especially now that they were getting to know each other. She was funny, and bounced off of Ian in a way only his siblings ever could. She was no Alice, and she would never occupy the same space in his heart that her girlfriend did, but Ian figured he could always use one more. 

It was late when he decided he’d be heading home. Mandy was staying over, because of course she was. But Ian had no reason to, nor did he want to intrude. 

He doesn’t remember much of the commute back to his apartment. 

When he walks in, Mickey is sitting at the kitchen table, again, nursing some sort of alcohol, again. 

“This is the saddest scene I’ve ever seen.” Ian meant for it to come off as a joke, but clearly Mickey didn’t take it that way, brows furrowing and mouth curling down into a frown. 

“Yeah, well, fuck you, Gallagher.” 

Ian took three deep breaths and counted to ten, the de-escalation exercises his therapist taught him. He was halfway drunk, which means to say that if their conversation went to complete shit, at least he wasn’t sober. 

“Mind if I sit?” 

“Your fuckin’ house.” 

Ian feels defeated. Maybe it wasn’t a sign from the universe, maybe the universe doesn’t actually give a shit. 

But Ian does. He gives a lot of shits at that moment. He has something to prove, he doesn’t know what it is, but he wants to show Mickey that he’s not like Mandy’s brother's friend. That he wants to give a shit. He wants to be Mickey’s friend, and drunk words are sober thoughts, right? 

So maybe he’s thought that all along. 

But he doesn’t know what to say, doesn’t know where to start. 

“What do you want?” He sounds exasperated, like he doesn’t know what to do. He looks so sad, too, and that’s something Ian can understand. 

He swallows his pride. He can blame it on the alcohol the next day. He can say he doesn’t remember anything 

He looks Mickey dead in the eye. 

“You.” 

Mickey breathes out a  _ fuck _ that’s nearly inaudible, and Ian can see the way his expression changes. He bites his lower lip a little and his pupils dilate just a touch. It was his turn to do something about it, he’s tired of waiting for Mickey every time. 

So he walks up to him and leans down so his mouth is level with Mickey’s ear. He starts palming Mickey’s dick through his jeans, and pays close attention to the way Mickey’s breath hitches. It sends a rush through him, makes him feel giddy. 

“Yeah?” he whispers into Mickey’s ear. Mickey doesn’t say anything, but he nods. 

_ “Please.”  _

He starts applying more pressure, grinding his hand down on Mickey’s dick that was hardening beneath him. He leaned down and began sucking on the skin behind his ear, licking up the column of his neck. 

Mickey pulled him in closer by the neck, and Ian started sucking harder, applying more pressure. He could feel Mickey coming undone beneath him, sinking further into the chair. It was driving Ian crazy, seeing him like that because of  _ him _ . 

He pulled away from his neck and stared into Mickey’s eyes. He hadn’t noticed his hand had stopped moving until Mickey was pushing his hand on top of Ian’s and forcing Ian to pick up his movements again. Ian grinned. There was something about seeing Mickey like this… he doesn’t know what it is, but it got to him the last time they fucked, and he knows it’ll get to him again if they keep this up. 

(He hopes they do.) 

Mickey takes the hand behind Ian’s head and uses it to pull him down so he crashes their lips together. He almost pulls away to ask if Lip is home, but if Mickey doesn’t care, neither does Ian. 

He licks into Mickey’s mouth, swallows his moans, muffles them with his lips. He feels bad for all the people that don’t get to see Mickey like this, open and willing. 

Mickey pulls away first, drawing back from the kiss. 

“ _ God _ , Gallagher can you fuckin’ do something?” 

Ian smiles at him devilishly, and grinds down harder. 

“Is this not good enough for you?” 

“No,” he says, but it’s breathless, and Ian knows he’s a liar. 

Ian’s also weak. He’s weak and he gets down on his knees in front of Mickey and starts to undo the button on his pants, pulling the zipper down. He pulls out Mickey’s dick, and starts moving his hand. Mickey shudders, and Ian is in awe. The lightbulb they’ve hung over their table as a makeshift lamp casting a soft glow around Mickey’s head, which is thrown back, eyes closed, lip drawn between his teeth. 

Ian doesn’t want to drag this out, if not for Mickey, than for him. Ian’s been thinking about it since the first night they did anything. 

Mickey is addictive. 

Ian leans forward and wraps his mouth around the head of Mickey’s cock, swirls his tongue until he figures out exactly to make Mickey fall apart. He teases him for a minute, keeping his focus on the tip, not moving past it. 

“Gallagher if you don’t-” Ian pulled off of him and smirked. Mickey groaned and rolled his eyes, but they were pleading. He wouldn’t say it, but he wanted Ian, and Ian could tell. 

Ian went back to his cock, taking more of it into his mouth until it hit the back of his throat, and started bobbing his head, going as slow as he pleased. He vaguely registered Mickey asking him to go faster. He sped up his movements, trying to get Mickey to come before Lip noticed what was going on. 

Fuck he’d forgotten about him. 

“Why the  _ fuck  _ did you stop?” And there was the Mickey that Ian had gotten used to. 

He nodded his head towards Lip’s room. He saw the realization as it dawned on Mickey, his eyes getting wide. He contemplated it for a moment, before turning back to Ian. 

“So what? That means you can’t suck my dick?” 

Ian smiled. Mickey would regret this if Lip ever saw any of it, but if he didn’t care, Ian didn’t either. Lip had walked in on him before, it’s bound to happen again. 

Ian wraps his lips around Mickey’s dick and lets Mickey thrust into his mouth. The angles a little awkward, especially for Mickey, but he doesn’t seem to mind, moans tripping over each other on their way out of his mouth. 

When he does come, Ian swallows, and he feels smug under Mickey’s awed gaze. 

“Fuck, if I had known you were this good at giving head I would’ve made you do it last time.” Mickey breathless, and clearly out of it, since he doesn’t notice what he’s said until he realizes Ian hasn’t given him a response. 

“What?”  _ He remembers.  _

“Nothing. Leave me alone, what the fuck are you doing?” 

“I didn’t say anything-”

“Yeah, well, you wanted to. Go be a fag somewhere else, I didn’t ask for this shit.”

Ian feels his heart sink as he watches Mickey fix his pants and storm out of the apartment. He feels defeated, and a little sad. He thought he was going somewhere, but he can already tell Mickey’s gonna go another week not talking to him. Maybe more. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t care. 

Or, at least, he doesn’t want to. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for the wait on this update!! i promise the next one will be out sooner ok pinky swear. as always leave a kudos and a comment if u liked it love yall

**Author's Note:**

> hope yall liked it!!! comments and kudos make my day if u leave some please take all my love.


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